And a clutch of mightily ambitious announcements regarding tie-ups with Marvell, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO and Samsung
Vodafone is to conduct a commercial pilot of a 5G Open RAN at mobile sites in two rural areas of Germany, starting in early 2023.
The operator, a staunch supporter of Open RAN, claims this will be the first deployment of Open RAN technology in Germany that complies with the specifications and roadmap endorsed by the Open RAN MoU group. The other members of the European MoU club, announced in early 2021, are Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and TIM.
The specifications define an architecture for the use of secure, open and interoperable multi-vendor equipment and have been adopted by industry-body Telecom Infra Project (TIP) as a blueprint for building Open RAN at scale in Europe.
Plans for the commercial pilot follow successful field tests earlier this year in Plauen, Germany and apparently support the German government’s ambition to expand the Open RAN ecosystem. The pilot will use software and radio equipment from Samsung, and will take place in south-east Bavaria and north-east Lower Saxony.
Vodafone intends to expand the deployment over the next two to three years in Germany as key steps in its schedule to equip 30% of its European sites with Open RAN by 2030.
Santiago Tenorio, Director of Network Architecture for Vodafone, stated, “This will be the first Open RAN system in Germany that not only uses open interfaces but is built on both hardware and software from multiple vendors that is fully interchangeable and interoperable based on the choice of the operator. It brings timely resilience to the supply chain.”
Making a market in their own image?
Next up, Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo have signed something of a grandstanding MoU, agreeing to cooperate on bringing the benefits of Open RAN to the wider operator and vendor community. Specifically, they will work on “harmonizing” mobile operators’ systems integration and test processes. This includes establishing test criteria and “experiences” [another ageing buzz word that needs to be binned as has become like Tourette’s – meaningless repetitions].
The upshot will be common test scripts or instructions on how to carry out a test in a consistent fashion. The idea behind this is that vendors will no longer need to work with each operator in its own special way saving time, money and resources, and ensuring everything is secure by design and all in keeping with definitions laid out by 3GPP and the ORAN Alliance.
The two aim to maximise the benefits of the Service Management Orchestrator, part of the Open RAN Network Operation Support System and the RAN Intelligent Controller platform (SMO/RIC). By identifying key features of SMO/RIC, they can determine their likely evolution and define the underlying software architecture.
Vodafone and DOCOMO also want to lower total cost of ownership for operators by making RAN technologies more efficient, and improving integration processes, artificial intelligence/machine learning and automation techniques, with a view to publishing a whitepaper.
This could also be seen as trying to shape other operators’ behaviour/approaches in your own image and pushing vendors to accept your version/approach as the industry standard dressed up as altruism. It will be worth revisiting to see what progress has been made.
Saving Europe
In yet another announcement today, Nokia and Vodafone are jointly to work on a compliant Open RAN solution which also has high industry and regional economic ambitions. The solution will be built on Nokia’s Reefshark system on a chip (SoC) tech – which was developed with Marvell, using commercial off the shelf (COTS) servers.
It “will enable the Open RAN system to reach functionality and performance parity with traditional mobile radio networks”. It will pull off this feat by boosting the Layer-1 processing capability which handles the connection of many users to the mobile base station and supports heavy data traffic.
Nokia states its credentials as being the first large European-based RAN equipment supplier to “fully support” Open RAN and the partnership “will help Vodafone meet its public target of having 30% of its European networks running on Open RAN by 2030” and boost the European Union’s bid for global leadership in digital infrastructure.
Vendor and operator aim to demonstrate an Open RAN baseband system, which processes customers’ traffic using in-line Layer-1 acceleration early next year. February in Barcelona would be a wild guess. The ultimate aim is to deploy the solution with COTS servers as per the ORAN Alliance’s vision of an open ecosystem.
Eminently clubbable
Vodafone’s outgoing group CTO, Johan Wibergh, is sticking to the platform script he has espoused throughout his tenure. He said in a statement, “Open RAN is transforming networks from pure communications systems into platforms for innovation. It transforms mobile masts into automated software-driven, smart towers capable of supporting new applications for use in telemedicine, homes, transport, and factories. It is why we have spearheaded the technology, together with other like-minded companies, to live deployments.
“I’m delighted to see Nokia’s commitment to the club…”
Putting a SoC in it with Marvell and Samsung
And finally…Vodafone and Samsung Electronics Co are jointly cooperating with silicon provider Marvell “to accelerate the performance and adoption of 5G Open Radio Access Networks (RAN) across Europe”. This is another strand in Vodafone’s quest with partners to raise Open RAN’s performance to that current single-supplier radios.
Marvell’s chipset, the OCTEON Fusion processor, carries out the calculations normally done by the standard central processing unit (CPU) in virtualised mobile networks. Combined with Samsung’s vRAN software, the hope it will speed up data processing to boost multiple, complex RAN functions. Further improvements are expected later.
The combination of the OCTEON processor and Samsung’s software should also reduce energy consumption at mobile sites by reducing the number of CPU cores. Specialised accelerator chips
for radio networks can improve the handling of vast amounts of traffic in densely populated areas compared with relying on a general purpose processors and can power Massive MIMO sites to deliver immense capacity to public gathering places like sports venues, shopping centres etc.