The mobile operator collaborated with Nokia for the trial, which took place on a live 5G standalone (5G SA) network.
The trial took place in the towns of Arcisate and Sernio on the fringes of The Alps in Northern Italy. Open RAN masts at these sites were connected to Vodafone’s main test centre in Milan over Vodafone’s 5G SA network.
Open RAN is non-proprietary version of the Radio Access Network (RAN) system that allows interoperation between cellular network equipment provided by different vendors.
Vodafone says it achieved performance results comparable with standard 5G RAN, including clocking mobile data download speeds of up to 1.1 Gbit/s and 160 Mbps uplink. The operator used Nokia’s AirScale Massive MIMO radios for the test, running Nokia’s RAN software running on hardware servers from Dell using Red Hat’s cloud infrastructure.
“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,” says Santiago Tenorio, Director of Network Architecture at Vodafone.
