Vodafone completed their 3 months long O-RAN 5G trials in 2 towns in Northern Italy, namely the towns of Arcisate and Sernio.
The trial utilized Nokia’s AirScale Massive MIMO radios and Nokia’s baseband software running on Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers and Red Hat OpenShift, a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, connected to Nokia’s standalone dedicated 5G core. It also used Nokia’s intelligent MantaRay Networks Management system for a consolidated network view and improved monitoring and management, Nokia said in a separate release.
At the time of trials, the O-RAN masts at these sites were connected back to Vodafone’s main test center in Milan over their 5G SA network.
Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone director of network architecture at Vodafone, said: “Vodafone is dedicated to supporting the development and adoption of Open RAN worldwide by fostering a diverse ecosystem of partners and solutions. This approach offers numerous benefits, including increased choice, enhanced energy efficiency, higher network capacity, and improved performance for customers.”
Mark Atkinson, head of RAN at Nokia, said: “Nokia’s collaborative anyRAN approach means that telecommunications providers can deploy Open RAN with the server hardware and CaaS layer of their choice. Together with our ecosystem partners, we are committed to providing our customers with more choice and higher performance in Open RAN solutions than they will see from other RAN suppliers.”
This trial is part of Vodafone’s plan to deploy O-RAN across Europe and to have 30% of its masts based on the technology by 2030.