Vodafone and Nokia complete Open RAN trial on live 5G standalone network

Nokia and Vodafone have reached a new milestone by completing an end-to-end Open RAN trial on the latter's live 5G standalone network in Italy.

The two companies have joined forces to boost the deployment of Open RAN solutions for a flexible network evolution. This trial highlights the maturity of Nokia's anyRAN approach that aims to give mobile operators and enterprises more flexibility in building networks.

Commenting on this milestone, Mark Atkinson, Head of RAN at Nokia, said, "Nokia's collaborative anyRAN approach means that Communication Service 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 more choice and higher performance in Open RAN solutions to our customers than they will see from other RAN suppliers."

The trial utilized the following solutions:

• Nokia's AirScale Massive MIMO radios
• Nokia's baseband software running on Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers and Red Hat OpenShift
• Nokia's intelligent MantaRay Networks Management system

Vodafone aims to implement Open RAN technology in 30% of its masts by 2030 and has already started commercial deployment of this technology. This move could potentially improve network performance, efficiency, and flexibility, benefiting consumers with better and more reliable services.

"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," said Santiago Tenorio, Director of Network Architecture at Vodafone.