The sites are in Wales and south-west England and will replace “high risk” Huawei kit by the end of 2027
Vodafone has officially kicked-off the installation of OpenRAN equipment, to replace legacy sites, for 2500 sites across Wales and the South-West of England.
The deployment will begin in Devon. OpenRAN technology will replace legacy Huawei technology across 2,500 mobile sites in Wales and south-west England. This will be “a multi-year phased delivery”, within the government’s deadline for eradicating designated high-risk vendors’ (HRV) technology from the RAN.
The decision to ban the use of Huawei equipment in public 5G networks was taken by Boris Johnson’s Government in 2020, after much vacillation. Last October the government extended the deadline for the removal of Huawei’s equipment from public 5G networks to the end of 2027.
Not compromising customer experience
Vodafone has been working to evolve the design of equipment over several years, trialling developments in increasingly complex environments, starting with proofs-of-concept deployments in the lab. Once the OpenRAN technology was validated in the lab, it was tested in rural locations, then in a multi-site deployment in the towns of Torquay and Exmouth.
Vodafone says key performance indicators (KPIs) now show that OpenRAN’s performance exceeds that of the legacy equipment in most areas, including 4G and 5G call success rates, and download and upload speeds across multiple frequencies.
The operator claims it can now begin to replace HRV technology from the network without compromising customer experience.
A key characteristic of OpenRAN is its interoperability, and Vodafone is exploring working with more companies to find novel ways of enhancing customer experience.
Rapid innovation
Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer, Vodafone UK (pictured), said: “The rapid innovation we have seen in the OpenRAN ecosystem is truly remarkable. The industry only started working on this concept in 2016 in earnest, so to see KPIs align to traditional technology is a testament to the work which has been done.
“Vodafone has been at the forefront of the OpenRAN ecosystem since Day One. OpenRAN is a central pillar to our network strategy for numerous reasons. Most importantly, we see this as a vehicle for transformation, opening doors that would otherwise have been closed.”
Vodafone’s OpenRAN programme works with partners and technologies including:
- Samsung on 4G and 5G radio, such as the 64T64R Massive MIMO, and the software platform
- Intel on the general purpose processor, acceleration hardware and network interface cards
- Keysight’s Nemo Solutions to assure OpenRAN’s performance from end-to-end and Keysight’s Open RAN Architect ahead of deployment to carry out functional and interoperability testing
- Dell PowerEdge servers for cloud based, OpenRAN workloads
- Capgemini for testing in Vodafone’s labs
- Wind River’s Cloud network platforms, which are also known as abstraction layer software.
UK lagging behind
An article in the Financial Times earlier this month warned that the UK is in danger of falling behind on 5G roll-out, despite it being one of the first countries to begin commercial deployments back in 2019.
The reasons given are limited investment by mobile phone operators and the disruption caused by the Huawei ban.
Regulator Ofcom said in May that 5G mobile coverage from at least one operator was available at 82% of inhabited locations and workplaces in the UK, but only 22% of these places have coverage by all network providers.