Emboldened by success in the United Kingdom, Vodafone plans to expand its 5G Open RAN into Europe using equipment from Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., beginning in Germany and Spain. The move into Europe builds on Vodafone UK’s launch of the first 5G Open RAN site in Bath, U.K. in January 2022, using Samsung’s virtualized RAN (vRAN) solution.
Vodafone and Samsung are achieving stable performance and capacity in Vodafone UK’s commercial network, according to Santiago Tenorio, Director of Network Architecture for Vodafone, exceeding targeted performance level and power savings in its strategic Open RAN sites located in Exmouth and Torquay, England.
In Germany, Vodafone will carry out pilot projects for Open RAN using Samsung’s 2G/4G vRAN and O-RAN compliant radio solutions. In Spain, Samsung joined Vodafone’s testbed in Ciudad Real, which was created to benchmark mature RAN providers and compare performance across both traditional and Open RAN. Samsung will deploy its Massive MIMO radios and 4G/5G vRAN to evaluate and verify their performance in Spain’s urban environment.
In the U.K., the companies are integrating Samsung’s 64T64R Massive MIMO radios with the 5G vRAN, carrying commercial data traffic. Recently, the companies also completed a data call using Samsung’s vRAN and NEC’s Massive MIMO radio, demonstrating multi-vendor interoperability for Vodafone’s commercial network.
“This illustrates how Open RAN technology can enable multi-vendor integration of vRAN, not only with single-band radios but also with more complex Massive MIMO radios,” Tenorio said.
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