Vodafone Launches Open RAN in Romania

Vodafone Group began commercial rollout of open RAN equipment in 20 cities in Romania. The implementation follows deployments in the UK and tests of the architecture elsewhere in its European footprint.

The Romania deployment follows trials in the country during 2023 and uses equipment from a range of vendors. For the commercial rollout, Samsung Electronics is supplying radio and baseband units covering 2G, 4G, and 5G. Dell Technologies servers are being used alongside Wind River software.

Vodafone has high hopes for the potential of open RAN in the country, highlighting it would eventually provide the opportunity for operators to reduce costs by sharing all hardware components (for example radio units), while independently managing their own RAN software on a common cloud infrastructure. It also believes the flexibility of the architecture would allow its customers to take full advantage of standalone 5G, citing network slicing.

Vodafone claims during European trials and its commercial UK deployment, the performance of open RAN equipment was either equal to or better than legacy kit in most measurements. The announcement is the company’s latest on upgrading its network in Romania in the space of a month after it previously signed a six-year deal with Ericsson to modernize its infrastructure.