Vodafone and Orange’s Rural 4G Open RAN Trial in Romania Marks Progress in Open RAN Collaboration

Vodafone and Orange’s Rural 4G Open RAN Trial in Romania Marks Progress in Open RAN Collaboration

(IN BRIEF) Vodafone and Orange have achieved a significant milestone by successfully conducting a pilot project involving real 4G calls over shared commercial network sites in rural Romania, utilizing Open Radio Access Network (RAN) technology. This achievement follows their joint commitment to building an Open RAN infrastructure in rural parts of Europe. Open RAN technology decouples software and hardware, enabling remote upgrades of base stations, reducing the need for physical site visits, and enhancing network automation. This partnership aims to create more flexible, cost-effective, and energy-efficient networks while supporting the European Commission’s goal of achieving 5G coverage in all populated areas by 2030.

(PRESS RELEASE) BERKSHIRE, 9-Oct-2023 — /EuropaWire/ —  Vodafone (LON: VOD), a British multinational leader in technology communications, and Orange proudly announce a groundbreaking achievement as they successfully conducted a pilot project, providing real-life experiences of 4G calls over a cluster of shared commercial network sites in a rural area near Bucharest, Romania, leveraging Open RAN technology.

This significant technological milestone builds upon the collaborative commitment of the two telecommunications giants, which was initially announced in February of this year. The partnership aims to construct an Open Radio Access Network (RAN) with RAN sharing in rural regions across Europe where both companies have existing mobile networks.

Open RAN technology, at its core, decouples software and hardware functionalities. This separation empowers mobile base stations to receive remote upgrades with new features and services, offering enhanced agility and cost-effectiveness while minimizing the need for physical site visits, thanks to heightened network automation. In the context of RAN sharing, this approach allows each operator to independently operate their virtualized RAN software on a shared cloud infrastructure, ultimately amplifying operator autonomy and differentiation while simultaneously reducing network operating costs.

Throughout this pilot initiative, featuring live commercial traffic, Vodafone and Orange joined forces with carefully selected vendor partners to showcase the advantages of a virtualized radio access network based on Open RAN standardized interfaces. One of the most notable benefits demonstrated was the ability to implement remote software changes.

Building upon the knowledge acquired from Vodafone UK’s Open RAN deployment and the successful integration tests conducted at Orange’s Open RAN laboratory in France, the two companies applied the same technology stack to their shared sites. This stack includes a Samsung commercial virtualized RAN solution, a Wind River abstraction layer facilitating the deployment and scalability of RAN software over hardware, and Dell PowerEdge servers.

Having achieved successful 4G calls over shared Open RAN sites in a rural setting, Vodafone and Orange are preparing to introduce 2G, which has already undergone successful laboratory testing, followed by 5G. Notably, this marks the first instance of 2G radio software being fully integrated within a virtualized Open RAN environment in Europe, simplifying deployment and eliminating the need for operationally complex overlay solutions.

Alberto Ripepi, Chief Network Officer, Vodafone, said: “Alongside Orange we have developed a model which will serve as a blueprint to extend mobile networks to rural communities across Europe. Open RAN sharing will allow us to reduce costs by sharing hardware components while independently managing our own RAN software in the cloud to be able to offer differentiated services to our respective customers.”

Bruno Zerbib, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Orange, said: “This first pilot deployment of Open RAN within Orange is an important milestone to demonstrate Open RAN is now mature for roll-out in brownfield networks. It opens the door for wider scale deployments across the group, and paves the way towards fully automated and intelligent networks.”

Open RAN represents a significant departure from traditional network sharing methodologies. By embracing open and virtualized RAN, and by leveraging disaggregated software and hardware, Vodafone and Orange gain greater flexibility when it comes to adding new radio sites or upgrading existing ones while simultaneously reducing costs and energy consumption. Furthermore, this approach will eventually allow operators to run distinct software containers on the same hardware, offering operational differentiation and independence.

Today’s announcement underscores the unwavering commitment of both companies to embrace Open RAN as the preferred technology for future mobile networks across Europe, contributing to a more resilient and robust vendor supply chain. This commitment also aligns with the European Commission’s ambitious target to ensure 5G coverage in all populated areas by 2030.

About Vodafone

Vodafone is the largest pan-European and African telecoms company. Our purpose is to connect for a better future by using technology to improve lives, digitalise critical sectors and enable inclusive and sustainable digital societies.

We provide mobile and fixed services to over 300 million customers in 17 countries, partner with mobile networks in 46 more and are also a world leader in the Internet of Things (IoT), connecting over 167 million devices and platforms. With Vodacom Financial Services and M-Pesa, the largest financial technology platform in Africa, we serve more than 71 million people across seven countries.

We are committed to reducing our environmental impact to reach net zero emissions by 2040, while helping our customers reduce their own carbon emissions by 350 million tonnes by 2030. We are driving action to reduce device waste and achieve our target to reuse, resell or recycle 100% of our network waste by 2025.

For more information, please visit www.vodafone.com, follow us on Twitter at @VodafoneGroup or connect with us on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/vodafone.

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About Orange 

Orange is one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators with revenues of 43.5 billion euros in 2022 and 136,000 employees worldwide at 30 June 2023, including 74,000 employees in France. The Group has a total customer base of 291 million customers worldwide at 30 June 2023, including 246 million mobile customers and 24 million fixed broadband customers. The Group is present in 26 countries. Orange is also a leading provider of global IT and telecommunication services to multinational companies under the brand Orange Business. In February 2023, the Group presented its strategic plan “Lead the Future”, built on a new business model and guided by responsibility and efficiency. “Lead the Future” capitalizes on network excellence to reinforce Orange’s leadership in service quality.

Orange is listed on Euronext Paris (symbol ORA) and on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol ORAN).

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SOURCE: VODAFONE