The UK operator's launch of open RAN technology is a brave step as doubts linger about the path ahead.

Iain Morris, International Editor

January 19, 2022

7 Min Read
Vodafone's first 5G open RAN site goes live – minus antennas

Courtesy of Vodafone, the UK has now switched on its first open RAN site in a major commercial network. Sort of.

At this stage, it comes without any open RAN antennas, which commentators might say are an important ingredient. Vodafone named South Korea's Samsung and Japan's NEC as antenna suppliers last year but is still waiting for them to develop compliant equipment. It expects that to materialize by the summer and is evidently using a workaround in the meantime.

Having assembled other parts that are compliant with the new-look technology, Vodafone was clearly not prepared to wait several months before making an announcement. Industry doubts still linger about open RAN, and Vodafone – as one of its main sponsors – is probably eager to demonstrate progress.

If the technology holds up, customers will be as oblivious to it as a bathroom visitor is to a recently installed U-bend. But it should also validate the operator's decision to use open RAN after the British government in 2020 announced a forthcoming ban on Huawei – a Chinese vendor that Vodafone relies on heavily.

Figure 1: Vodafone headquarters in the UK town of Newbury (Source: Vodafone) Vodafone headquarters in the UK town of Newbury
(Source: Vodafone)

That move largely explains Vodafone UK's enthusiasm for open RAN and desire to make it a success. The concept is all about redesigning the interfaces between different parts of the radio access network so that operators do not have to buy everything from the same supplier's system – as they do currently. The optimistic take is that open RAN will produce competition for the big kit vendors by allowing specialists a role.

Still, most other UK operators were not prepared to make a risky bet on an unproven technology, instead signing deals with Ericsson or Nokia (or both) when authorities moved against Huawei. Vodafone, by contrast, took the long-term strategic view that overreliance on the Nordic vendors would lead to an unhealthy duopoly. It regards the swap-out of Huawei as an opportunity to introduce new open RAN suppliers into the market.

Accordingly, it plans to install open RAN at about 2,500 mainly rural sites in the west of the UK, all of which are currently served by Huawei. It settled on its supplier choices last year, handing a huge role to South Korea's Samsung as a provider of both radio units and RAN software. Others now active at the first site – near the English city of Bath – include Dell and Intel, which are contributing servers and the chips inside them, as well as Wind River Studio, used as a software management platform.

It is undeniably a brave move by Vodafone given the doubts that surround the fledgling technology. This appears to be not only the first UK deployment of open RAN to support 5G services but the first anywhere in Europe. The next step is to deploy what has been described as a "golden cluster" of ten sites in the same geographical area. While the location has yet to be decided, this rollout will let Vodafone assess interoperability between sites – not only within the open RAN footprint but including traditional technology as well.

Vodafone has been given until the end of 2027 to strip all Huawei 5G products out of its network, and there are several concerns about its open RAN endorsement. The latest, of course, is the hold-up on delivery of open RAN antennas. Any delay beyond the summer, especially one that affects two unconnected vendors, might give ammunition to critics who already insist that piecing together different suppliers brings too much operational complexity. Vodafone, it should be noted, reckons slotting these open RAN antennas into position will be as easy as building Lego – once, that is, the equipment has been verified at its labs.

Dog's dinner?

Another concern, flagged by Vodafone itself, is that most open RAN companies provide little or no support for 2G and 3G, older network technologies still in widespread use. This leaves Vodafone with a choice – wait until those systems can be switched off before launching open RAN services, or run two networks in parallel, a traditional RAN for ageing standards and open RAN for the young ones. The latter option would "create a dog's dinner of capabilities," said Ker Anderson, Vodafone UK's head of radio and performance, during a press event last September.

And yet that is precisely what Vodafone is doing at its first open RAN site. Back in September, staff complained about the longevity of 3G, which continues to be used by customers. The suggestion then was that much of the open RAN deployment would brush up against the government deadline for replacing Huawei, when 3G has finally expired.

Want to know more about 5G? Check out our dedicated 5G content channel here on Light Reading.

But Vodafone also acknowledged 3G will be much easier to phase out than 2G, which may be needed for roaming services (and maybe even some machine-to-machine communications) into the 2030s. While it has indicated that Samsung will supply 2G systems, a technology executive at another big European operator – who preferred to remain anonymous – doubts the South Korean vendor's 2G expertise.

Before it showed up on Vodafone's list of open RAN suppliers, Samsung did not deny it catered only to 4G and 5G, meaning any 2G capabilities have been recently acquired. What's more, Vodafone's first open RAN site will continue to use Huawei's existing network for not just 3G but 2G services as well.

The rest of the Huawei job

The big question is what happens across the rest of the Huawei footprint. At a press briefing in early 2019, Scott Petty – then UK chief technology officer but now the group's chief digital officer – told journalists that Huawei supplied kit for about 6,000 of Vodafone's 18,000 sites. This appears to leave the fate of 3,500 sites undecided. Open RAN kit for busier and more demanding locations is not expected to be available until the mid-2020s, giving Vodafone only two or three years to deploy it before the government deadline is up.

The suitability of named suppliers for that job is also debatable. Server chips for the rural deployment come from Intel's stock of x86 processors, but some telco executives believe customized silicon developed by other companies will be needed in dense urban environments. They include Petty, who last year described some of the initial vendor claims about open RAN performance as outlandish. "Now they need to deliver, but it will require some dedicated silicon. It won't be Intel chips," he said.

Vodafone does not have to substitute open RAN for Huawei everywhere. It could always limit its deployment to those 2,500 sites and rely on Ericsson or Nokia for the remainder. But it is already heavily dependent on Ericsson, which had responsibility for more than 10,000 Vodafone UK sites back in 2019. And it has been phasing Nokia out of its London network in a sign of unhappiness about the Finnish vendor's technology. If open RAN ends up with only 2,500 sites, it will account for just 14% of the Vodafone footprint – not much for a champion of the approach.

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— Iain Morris, International Editor, Light Reading

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About the Author(s)

Iain Morris

International Editor, Light Reading

Iain Morris joined Light Reading as News Editor at the start of 2015 -- and we mean, right at the start. His friends and family were still singing Auld Lang Syne as Iain started sourcing New Year's Eve UK mobile network congestion statistics. Prior to boosting Light Reading's UK-based editorial team numbers (he is based in London, south of the river), Iain was a successful freelance writer and editor who had been covering the telecoms sector for the past 15 years. His work has appeared in publications including The Economist (classy!) and The Observer, besides a variety of trade and business journals. He was previously the lead telecoms analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, and before that worked as a features editor at Telecommunications magazine. Iain started out in telecoms as an editor at consulting and market-research company Analysys (now Analysys Mason).

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