Open RAN at Vodafone: looking beyond the accolades

On 14 June, Vodafone announced the vendors that would support what it positioned as “the first commercial deployment of open RAN in Europe”. With an initial focus on the 2,500 open RAN sites in the UK, suppliers include Samsung (RAN software provider and radio), NEC (radio), Dell (CU/DU servers), Wind River cloud native hosting platform), Keysight Technologies (test solution) and Capgemini Engineering (lab testing and interworking. Putting aside claims of industry firsts, Vodafone remains the eighth largest operator group in the world; its network transformation strategies and sourcing decisions carry a lot of weight and tell us much about the potential shape of the industry.