Vodafone begins its tender for 170,000 sites and Verizon has just announced it has 130,000 that are Open RAN-ready, but we’re not under starter’s orders yet
On its earnings call with analysts and press yesterday, Vodafone Group’s CEO, Margherita Della Valle, said the operators will start the tender for 170,000 Open RAN sites it announced last October. The operator reckons this is the probably the biggest Open RAN tender so far. It stretches across its opcos in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Watch the video of Santiago Tenorio talking about Vodafone’s Open RAN plans at Mobile Europe’s 5G and Beyond conference last week.
Vodafone Group’s largest stakeholder and business partner, e&, will be involved in procurement. Whether or not Vodafone opts for a single, dual or multiple supplier(s) remains to be seen.
Tenets of the Open RAN religion are creating an open ecosystem to cut costs, reduce reliance on a handful of suppliers and boost innovation. Yet in December, AT&T surprised the market by signing a deal with Ericsson for open RAN deployment across the US over the next five years. The contract could be worth up to $15 billion.
If the UK market is an indication of what it is to come, Samsung could do well out of the tender. It has provided RAN software and radios in the limited UK deployment. It could well be that Vodafone opts for centralised approach to leverage scale, control and replicable integration and processes.
Verizon is poised
And talking of Samsung and scale, over the Pond Verizon announced it has deployed over 130,000 Open-RAN ready radios. They include massive MIMO radios which are part of the 15,000 Open RAN-compliant virtualised cell sites announced last September. These sites have O-RAN compliant baseband units.
The US operator began implementing Samsung’s virtual RAN (vRAN) equipment several years ago as part of its roadmap to Open RAN. This latest announcement from Verizon does not provide information about how and when the transition to Open RAN will begin.
It had mooted Open RAN trials by the end of last year but has not made public any information to that effect. Verizon has said it intends to have deployed vRAN equipment at 20,000 sites by 2025.