EOLO signs up another vendor to power Italian FWA pushEOLO signs up another vendor to power Italian FWA push

In December last year Nokia announced that it would supply the EOLO with some equipment from its 5G AirScale portfolio including baseband kit, Massive MIMO radios, and Remote Radio Head products.

Then last week it was announced the operator had signed a multi-year collaboration agreement with ZTE which will see the latter provide the former with 5G mmWave radio access kit, including RAN basebands, RAN radio and fixed wireless access CPE terminals.

The operator has now added another vendor to the pot with Mavenir. Today’s release claims this will be Europe’s first 5G Standalone mmWave FWA Network – though that was also a brag featured in the previous Nokia release – and is designed to pipe in ultrafast broadband internet access to areas of Italy that haven’t had fibre rollouts.

The Mavenir kit will work alongside the User Plane Function (UPF) from 6Wind, “marking an industry-first for interoperability and subsequent commercial deployment between Session Management Functions (SMF) and User Plane Functions (UPF) from two different vendors,” so says the release.

The Mavenir 5G SA Core will deliver both IP and Ethernet data units (IPDU and EPDU), which it says has never previously been achieved in a live environment.

“This is one of the most exciting and innovative 5G FWA deployments in the world – it is pushing boundaries and using the very best 3GPP-based technologies available to deliver rural connectivity against all odds,” said Stefano Cantarelli, Executive Vice President at Mavenir. “EOLO has selected best-in-class partners for this project and Mavenir is proud to be a part of that team, bringing our 5G leadership and commitment to flexibility and agility.”

Guido Garrone, CEO at EOLO S.p.A., added: “Mavenir is an excellent team player. Their 5G Core is future-proofed, and the interoperability of their solution has enabled EOLO to choose the best partners for each element of this challenging and innovative new network. The infrastructures that we are building together will complement fibre coverage, playing a pivotal role in strengthening networks and driving the country's future growth.”

5G SA in general seems to plodding along a bit in Europe – earlier this month Connect Europe put out a report claiming 5G SA covered just 40% of the European population by end-2024 compared with 91% in North America. Industry stakeholders lamenting this will be hoping for more progress on the rollout, and this will no doubt feature as a key talking point at the upcoming MWC show.