Vodafone and Nokia today announced the successful completion of a three-month Open RAN trial on a standalone 5G test network (5G SA) in the cities of Arcisate (Va) and Sernio (So).
The Open RAN antennas at these sites in northern Lombardy were connected to Vodafone’s main test center in Milan via Vodafone’s high-speed, high-capacity 5G SA network, which also uses Nokia technology.
Download speed… gigabit
As part of the trial, Vodafone and Nokia achieved comparable functional and performance results with the 5G RAN standard, including recording speeds of Mobile data download up to 1.1 Gbit/s and 160 Mbps uplink.
Vodafone and Nokia engineers also achieved encouraging results in other areas, including latency (response time).
At the center of the trial were the Massive MIMO AirScale radio from Nokia (ua technology suitable for connecting many users in crowded urban areas) and the first deployment of Nokia’s RAN software running on Dell’s commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware servers using Red Hat’s cloud infrastructure.
The trial also included Nokia’s MantaRay smart network management system to provide Vodafone with a consolidated view of the network to ensure better monitoring and traffic management. This is a vital component in all business networks that handle customer traffic.
Diversified Ecosystem
Santiago Tenorio, Director of Network Architecture at Vodafone, said: “Vodafone is committed to supporting the development and adoption of Open RAN across the world by fostering a diverse ecosystem of partners and solutions. This approach offers numerous benefits, including greater choice, improved energy efficiency, higher network capacity and improved performance for customers.”
The trial also highlighted the maturity of theNokia’s anyRAN approach designed to give mobile operators and enterprises greater flexibility in building multi-vendor automated networks. The ability to combine software and hardware from different vendors is the foundation of Open RAN and is critical to driving innovation and supply chain resilience.
Greater Choice
Mark Atkinson, head of RAN at Nokia, added: “Nokia’s anyRAN collaborative approach means that telecom providers can deploy Open RAN with the server hardware and Communication as a Service (CaaS) layer of their choice. Together with our ecosystem partners, we are committed to providing our customers with more choices and greater performance in Open RAN solutions than they will see from other RAN vendors.”
Furthermore, Nokia supports Open Fronthaul functionality in addition to its high-performance RAN software, which ensures mobile operators have performance consistency with their existing RAN.
This trial is another step in Vodafone’s strategy to widely deploy Open RAN in Europe, with the aim of have 30% of its sites based on this technology by 2030.
It builds on the already underway deployment of Open RAN sites in the UK and Romania. By partnering with key strategic vendors such as Nokia, Vodafone is pioneering the widespread adoption of open, disaggregated and automated networks, providing greater agility to rapidly adopt and launch new, innovative customer-focused services.
Photo Vodafone Press Office