Orange and Vodafone are expanding a pilot project to share 4G Open RAN sites in rural areas in Romania.
The two operators said that the expansion of the pilot, first announced last year during TIP’s FYUZ event, includes deployment of Samsung’s 2G vRAN.
Support for 2G vRAN is something Samsung has had on its roadmap for a while now. Without it, operators need to have a separate vendor or layer for 2G, instead of deploying a single vRAN.
In August 2023 we reported that Vodafone UK would be rolling out Samsung 2G vRAN in the “coming months”, although no firmer deadline was given. In the UK, Vodafone is replacing 2,500 of its Huawei sites using Samsung’s vRAN within an Open RAN design.
As we wrote then, “It would make sense for the majority of the 2,500 site rollout to take advantage of this 2G capability, rather than roll out a two layer solution in parallel. So although today marks the offical start of volume deployment, Vodafone said to TMN, “We will gradually ramp up over the coming months.” That would give it time to integrate Samsung’s 2G radio into a single RAN plan.
A Samsung blog published this week described the Romania deployment as “the first time 2G vRAN has been fully integrated within a commercial shared Open RAN environment in Europe.”
You can certainly read across that Vodafone now sees that Samsung’s 2G vRAN is ready for operations – confirmed for us on background by one Vodafone executive.
Samsung itself is keen to talk up the import of its now native support for 2G from vRAN. The blog post describes vRAN 2G as “a major opportunity for mobile operators to improve and operationalize their 2G networks. Built on dedicated hardware, legacy 2G networks can be costly to maintain and update over time but virtualization can help address this.”
Some vendors, such as Mavenir and Parallel wireless have announced commercial vRAN support for 2G for years now. Parallel was the first to market an “all G” capability, while Mavenir’s support was a result of its purchase of ip.access in 2020. Parallel said in January this year that it has deployed 1,500 Open RAN sites in Africa with a mix of 2G-3G and 2G-4G support.
MORAN sharing
Another thing to note about this network share is that it uses the MORAN (Multi Operator RAN) sharing architecture. That means everything is shared including the RU (antenna), with each operator transmitting its own cells from those shared antennas in its own spectrum.
For this rural deployment, not surprisingly, the DU workloads are running on distributed sites with servers co-located with the RUs.
Orange and Samsung Open RAN?
The shared sites are based on the Samsung Vodafone deployment blueprint, with Samsung vRAN software on Wind River on Intel-based Dell servers. You can see a video from Samsung on the site sharing deployment below. Although the site build built on the same ecosystem that Samsung has developed and deployed with Vodafone, Samsung is clearly boosted by Orange’s participation, while Orange has been putting the Samsung vRAN through its paces at its own centre in Bucharest and seems happy with what it has found, describing performance as on par with traditional RAN.
Orange’s Arnaud Vamparys, Chief technology Innovation Officer, says, “This commercial deployment with Samsung could serve as a blueprint for other deployments in Europe.”
Marius Maican, Technology Director, Orange Romania, said, “This first hands on experience of an Open RAN network in the field in Romania is a step forward for Orange in its journey towards more agile and automated cloud-native networks. Building on this successful pilot we plan to extend the expertise centre in Bucharest to support future Open RAN deployments at scale across the Orange footprint.”
Samsung’s Misun Jo, Corporate VP, Head of Europe BD, Samsung Electronics, said, “This is a significant milestone in the collaboration between Samsung and Orange. Orange is one of the leading customers when it comes to O-RAN and we look forward to further collaboration.”
