In a significant development for Europe's telecommunications sector, Vodafone (NASDAQ:VOD) and Nokia (NYSE:NOK) commenced a commercial 5G Open RAN trial in northern Italy on Tuesday. This initiative is part of a broader effort to stimulate competition and innovation within the industry by utilizing advanced technologies.
The trial leverages the Red Hat OpenShift platform hosted on Dell (NYSE:DELL) PowerEdge XR8000 servers. A key component of this project is a Smart NIC (NASDAQ:EGOV) for Layer 1 processing, which Nokia and Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL) jointly developed. The companies aim to showcase the performance parity of Nokia’s Open RAN solution with its purpose-built RAN, and validate the essential Open Fronthaul interfaces that form part of the Open RAN architecture.
Simultaneously, Vodafone is partnering with ARM to expedite the development of chipsets for future 4G and 5G Open RAN networks using power-efficient Arm-based architecture. The company is collaborating with firms such as Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Samsung (KS:005930), Dell, SynaXG, Ampere Computing®, and Fujitsu for RAN software. This forms part of Vodafone's substantial investment in O-RAN technologies that standardize radio access kit design and enhance interoperability.
Vodafone has begun a "volume deployment" of OpenRAN across rural UK areas, aiming to target 2,500 sites by 2027. Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone's Director of Network Architecture, emphasized the collaboration's role in aiding smaller companies with testing and verification for greater innovation, energy efficiency, and security for customers.
The testing phase will start this year in vendor laboratories and extend to Vodafone's test centers in Málaga and Newbury by 2024. Fujitsu will provide 5G commercial Open RAN software for these tests. The results of this collaboration will be accessible to the entire industry.
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