Orange and Vodafone announced that they have conducted a pilot with real-life experience of 4G calls over a cluster of shared commercial network sites in a rural area near Bucharest, Romania, based on Open RAN (radio access network) technology.
The latest technological step follows the two companies’ announcement in February this year that they will build an Open RAN with RAN sharing in rural parts of Europe, where they both have mobile networks. Open RAN technology decouples software and hardware functionalities. This enables mobile base stations to be upgraded with new features and services remotely and more cost-effectively, reducing the need for site visits thanks to better network automation.
In the context of RAN sharing, it will also allow each operator to operate their own virtualised RAN software on common cloud infrastructure in the future, enhancing operator autonomy and differentiation while sharing network costs.
Within this pilot with commercial traffic, Orange and Vodafone worked together with vendor partners, individually selected, to demonstrate the benefits of a virtualised radio access network based on Open RAN standardised interfaces, including the ability to make remote software changes.
Drawing on Orange’s integration tests in the Open RAN laboratory in France, and the experience gained from Vodafone UK’s Open RAN deployment, the companies have used the same stack on their shared sites. This includes a Samsung commercial virtualised RAN solution, a Wind River abstraction layer on top of hardware to deploy and scale the RAN software, and Dell PowerEdge servers.
Following the completion of 4G calls over shared Open RAN sites in a rural location, Orange and Vodafone will soon introduce 2G, which has already been tested in the lab, and then 5G.
It will be the first time 2G radio software is fully integrated within a virtualised Open RAN environment in Europe, simplifying deployment while avoiding the need for more operationally complex overlay solutions.
“This first pilot deployment of Open RAN within Orange is an important milestone to demonstrate Open RAN is now mature for roll-out in brownfield networks,” says Bruno Zerbib, chief technology and innovation officer at Orange. “It opens the door for wider scale deployments across the group, and paves the way towards fully automated and intelligent networks.”
Open RAN offers significant advantages over traditional network sharing. By using open and virtualised RAN and relying on disaggregated software and hardware, Orange and Vodafone will each have flexibility when adding new radio sites or upgrading existing ones, while keeping the cost and energy consumption low. Eventually, it will also allow operators to run different software containers on the same hardware, providing operational differentiation and independence.
“Alongside Orange, we have developed a model which will serve as a blueprint to extend mobile networks to rural communities across Europe,” says Alberto Ripepi, chief network officer, of Vodafone. “Open RAN sharing will allow us to reduce costs by sharing hardware components while independently managing our own RAN software in the cloud to be able to offer differentiated services to our respective customers.”
The announcement reinforces the companies’ respective and individual commitment to rollout Open RAN as the technology of choice for future mobile networks across Europe. The companies’ commitment to Open RAN also supports the European Commission’s target to have 5G in populated areas by 2030.
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