Vodafone open-RAN senior engineer, Nikoleta Patroni, said that their plan is to have 30% of all Vodafone’s European Union (EU) mobile sites on open-RAN by 2030.
Vodafone Group confirmed it would create purpose-built chipset architecture for the nascent technology with semiconductor chip-maker Intel Corporation on Monday. This emphasises the company’s commitment to open radio access network (RAN).
Santiago Tenorio, director of network architecture at Vodafone, confirmed the partners would together create chipsets at its campus in Malaga, Spain. The chipsets will be available to smaller third-party vendors to test their own algorithms without a large financial outlay in silicon.
“Combining Vodafone’s networking expertise with Intel’s strength in silicon architecture design will enable rapid prototyping, verification and testing, eventually leading to a faster mass production of the chips the industry needs to accelerate,” he said.
Vodafone agreed to work with the U.S. chipmaker on the potential to design its own chip architecture in 2022.
On Monday, Vodafone and Orange announced their successful completion of 4G calls in a rural area near Bucharest using open-RAN technology. This achievement was made possible using hardware and software from Samsung Electronics, Wind River Systems and Dell.
Meanwhile, in Italy, Vodafone is conducting a pilot project in collaboration with Nokia to demonstrate that Nokia’s Open RAN solution can deliver equivalent functionality and performance when compared to its dedicated RAN infrastructure.
