Orange and Vodafone have completed 4G calls over a cluster of shared commercial network sites in a rural area near Bucharest, Romania, based on Open RAN technology.
This technological milestone follows the two companies’ announcement in February this year that they will build an Open Radio Access Network with RAN sharing in rural parts of Europe where they both have mobile networks.
Open RAN technology decouples software and hardware functionalities. This enables mobile base stations to be upgraded with new features and services remotely, quickly and more cost effectively, reducing the need for site visits thanks to greater network automation. In the context of RAN sharing, it will also allow each operator to operate their own virtualized RAN software on a common cloud infrastructure in future, enhancing operator autonomy and differentiation while sharing network costs.
Within this pilot with commercial traffic, Orange and Vodafone worked together with key vendor partners. This includes a Samsung commercial virtualized RAN solution, Wind River abstraction layer on top of hardware to deploy and scale the RAN software, and Dell PowerEdge servers.
Following the successful completion of 4G calls over shared Open RAN sites in a rural location, Orange and Vodafone will soon introduce 2G, which has already been tested successfully in lab, and then 5G.
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.”
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.”
