Vodafone has announced its plans to fast-track the development of new platforms for Open Radio Access Networks (Open RAN) using the Arm® architecture. In collaboration with Arm, Vodafone said it is committed to enabling the competitive landscape for Open RAN chipsets and the associated ecosystem by providing smaller companies with the necessary testing and verification support to become part of these next generation networks.
“Vodafone is helping the ecosystem to become fully flexible here,” Mobile-Experts Principal Joe Madden told Inside Towers. “For Open RAN to succeed, the ecosystem needs to have multiple choices at each step of the supply chain, including the software, hardware, and semiconductors.”
“In a Virtual Open RAN system, Intel has been the dominant semiconductor choice so far, but ARM presents an alternative to the x86 chipset so that competition can happen at the chip level,” Madden added.
This next generation of platforms featuring high-performance Arm-based processors are optimized for use in Open RAN base stations and will be developed with enough compute power to support customer demand for advanced 5G services requiring greater capacity. Based on Open RAN principles, the processors are using industry standard servers while also delivering significant advances in energy efficiency.
The results of this collaborative partnership will be made available to the entire industry with the intention of transforming networks from pure communications systems into disaggregated and open platforms for innovation. The utilization of more energy efficient chipsets will also contribute to Vodafone’s ambition of achieving net zero by 2040.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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