Nokia, Vodafone partner for commercial 5G Open RAN pilot trial in Italy

Finnish telecom gear maker Nokia and British mobile and broadband operator Vodafone have partnered to run a commercial 5G Open Radio Access Network (RAN) pilot trial in Italy for the first time.

Vodafone aims to widely deploy Open RAN across Europe, with the aim of having 30% of its masts based on the technology by 2030. It follows the telecom operator’s recent announcement to deploy 2,500 Open RAN sites in the UK.

The companies’ commercial 5G Open RAN pilot will cover a cluster of sites in northern Italy. It will involve Nokia’s containerised baseband software running on Red Hat OpenShift, hosted on the latest generation Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers, Nokia said in a statement Monday.

Designed for Open RAN and mobile edge computing workloads, the Dell PowerEdge servers will support a Smart Network Interface Card (NIC) for Layer 1 processing developed by Nokia in cooperation with Marvell.

The deployment will include the validation of Open RAN-compliant Open Fronthaul interfaces (which include antennas and the baseband unit).

Nokia’s Swedish rival Ericsson recently committed to lead the industrialisation of Open RAN, including bringing support for open fronthaul in its Cloud RAN and radio gear.

Ericsson claims to have deployed over one million radios that are hardware-ready for the next generation of open fronthaul technology and, with the new radio platforms released this year, it has a complete Open RAN-ready offering across its Massive MIMO and remote radio portfolios. The vendor will introduce support for open fronthaul in its Cloud RAN portfolio, starting in 2024.

“Through greater collaboration, Vodafone and Nokia will also foster a new developer ecosystem in our home markets by providing a live software-based open network on which to launch innovative products and services for our customers,” said Alberto Ripepi, Chief Network Officer, Vodafone.

“Nokia’s collaborative anyRAN approach means that Communication Service Providers (CSPs) can deploy Cloud RAN with the server hardware and CaaS layer of their choice,” said Mark Atkinson, Head of Radio Access Networks at Nokia.

Vodafone and Nokia are now focussing on building open and interoperable networks to meet enterprise and consumer demand for highly responsive 5G services built on AI and extended reality.

“Vodafone’s 5G open RAN pilot is a leading example of collaboration in action, and we are pleased to bring Red Hat OpenShift as an interoperable, consistent and scalable foundation for open RAN,” said Shlomi Moscovici, VP of Telco, Media and Entertainment, EMEA, Red Hat.

“Through our ongoing collaboration with Nokia and Red Hat, we’re providing an open infrastructure platform to Vodafone that enables network innovation and new service delivery,” said Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president and general manager, Telecom Systems Business, Dell Technologies.

“Marvell is pleased to collaborate with Nokia and the broader Cloud-RAN ecosystem to deliver scalable wireless RAN baseband silicon solutions for the emerging AI-era. Cloud-optimized silicon is critical to delivering scalable system performance with efficient power and cost as cloud and RAN technologies converge to provide feature and performance parity to traditional RAN solutions,” said Will Chu, senior VP and GM, Compute & Custom Business Unit, Marvell.