Vodafone said the O-RAN trial took place in two towns in Northern Italy
Vodafone and Nokia announced they have completed a three-month Open RAN (O-RAN) trial across a live 5G Standalone (5G SA) test network in Italy, Vodafone said in a release.
Vodafone said that the trial took place in the towns of Arcisate and Sernio, in Northern Italy.
During the trial, O-RAN masts at these sites were connected back to Vodafone’s main test center in Milan over Vodafone’s 5G SA network.
The trial utilized Nokia’s AirScale Massive MIMO radios and Nokia’s baseband software running on Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers and Red Hat OpenShift, an hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, connected to Nokia’s standalone dedicated 5G core. It also used Nokia’s intelligent MantaRay Networks Management system for a consolidated network view and improved monitoring and management, Nokia said in a separate release.
As part of the trial, Vodafone and Nokia achieved functional and performance results comparable with standard 5G RAN, including mobile data download speeds of up to 1.1 Gbps and 160 Mbps in the uplink. Engineers from Vodafone and Nokia also achieved encouraging results in terms of latency.
Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone director of network architecture at Vodafone, said: “Vodafone is dedicated to supporting the development and adoption of Open RAN worldwide by fostering a diverse ecosystem of partners and solutions. This approach offers numerous benefits, including increased choice, enhanced energy efficiency, higher network capacity, and improved performance for customers.”
Mark Atkinson, head of RAN at Nokia, said: “Nokia’s collaborative anyRAN approach means that telecommunications providers can deploy Open RAN with the server hardware and CaaS layer of their choice. Together with our ecosystem partners, we are committed to providing our customers with more choice and a higher performance in Open RAN solutions than they will see from other RAN suppliers.
The trial is part of Vodafone’s strategy to widely deploy O-RAN across Europe, with the aim of having 30% of its masts based on the technology by 2030. The telco had already deployed O-RAN sites in the U.K. and Romania. In the U.K, Vodafone has already deployed a total of 2,500 sites.
