Vodafone drops OpenRAN bombshell

At the TIP Summit in Amsterdam Vodafone announced it was thinking of shifting all of its European mobile sites to OpenRAN technology

The thinking has got so far that is set to issue a 5G tender, which would involve up to 100,000 sites, for the work, according to Light Reading. The announcement was made live on stage by Yago Tenorio, Vodafone’s head of network strategy, on the opening morning of the latest TIP (Telecoms Infra Project) Summit.

“It is a really significant opportunity for OpenRAN to scale,” said Tenorio. “We are willing to swap out sites if we have to. The ambition is to have modern, up-to-date, lower-cost kit in every site. We are not announcing the results today because this just kicked off but stay tuned because it may be a significant acceleration of the open RAN ecosystem.”

The main point of OpenRAN is to loosen the stranglehold the big kit vendors have over the RAN market with their proprietary technology by commoditising it. Vodafone’s move coincides with the commencement of its European 5G roll-out and at a time when it remains unclear which vendors will be allowed to participate in which countries.

It looks like TIP itself is quite heavily involved in pushing OpenRAN, having issued a request for information to the equipment industry on how to build a 5G network based on it, that will run on other commoditized tech such as x86 servers and use open interfaces. Apparently none of the big three kit vendors responded to the request, but plenty of other companies did, with Samsung especially putting itself in a strong position, so it looks like this could really shake things up.