Orange and Samsung have released some details on the conclusion of a field trial of Samsung’s Open vRAN in a pilot network in South West France. The trial saw Samsung provide its vARN software and triple band radios, using a Wind River cloud environment on Dell servers, mirroring the Samsung set-up at Vodafone, and as used in an Open RAN sharing pilot in Romania, with Vodafone.
A quote from Orange France’s CTO Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon said that the field trial in France, “paves the way for our future cloud RAN deployment.”
The extent to which European operators will deploy Open RAN equipment from outside the Nokia-Ericsson duopoly has been a subject of much discussion. A cast list of candidates has been somewhat whittled, with Samsung emerging as lead supporting actor, with other still confined to walk-ons and bit parts.
Vodafone has delayed public announcement of its Spring 6 RAN tender, through which it wanted to see about 30% of its (now diminished) network estate be Open RAN by 2030. It seems likely that its preferred Open RAN vendor, Samsung, will come out well from the Open RAN elements of the tender. In the UK the operator is using Samsung to drive the 2,500 rural and suburban sites it is replacing under Government rules.
Deutsche Telekom has slipped too, pushing its deployment date for Nokiato provide 3,000 Open RAN dsites back a year, whilst initially retaining some interest in awarding Mavenir some business outside of Germany.
Telefonica has had a diverse approach to Open RAN. It contracted with NEC to lead as systems integrator on projects back in 2021: trials in Germany had a diverse list of vendors including Altiostar (now Rakuten Symphony). In the UK, NEC was hosting a similar small scale trial. By mid 2024 it announced that its first commercial vRAN site was supplied by Samsung. In the UK, VMO2, half-owned by Telefonica, announced it would be working with Mavenir. Meanwhile, Telefonica Spain seemed quite interested in the AT&T Ericsson-centric approach.
10,000 sites from 2027
Orange’s O-RAN ambitions can certainly be described as methodical. Having said in November that it now considered Open RAN ready for volume deployment, the company will publicise a RAN renewal tender for all its European country sites in 2026. Within that tender, all solutions will be required to have Open RAN support. That would lead it to begin “volume” deployment of Cloud RAN and Open RAN solutions from 2027.
Orange has said previously it is satisfied about 2T2R and 4T4R products, but it has also ben encouraged by work in massive MIMO, meaning that it thinks it could support dense urban massive MIMO Open RAN products from a single server by 2026. One reason for that progression has been chipset development – notably Intel’s Sapphire Rapids platform.
Speaking to TMN earlier this year, Elizabeth Py, VP Green & Radio Networks at Orange Innovation, said that the operator is currently assessing the scope of that volume rollout, which will be determined by in-country roadmaps and requirements, but she put the addressable scope for the Open RAN element in the order of magnitude of about 10,000 sites. France could well be in the first wave, but that is not confirmed.
“We know we need to have scale to have an impact on pricing,” Py said.
Meanwhile the operator is asking its current vendors to make sure that all equipment is “Open RAN-ready”. The operator is also still assessing its cloud options for supporting the vRAN.
Py said that the operator wants to capture the benefits both of Cloud RAN, and of Open RAN. “Cloud RAN brings the efficiency of automation and off-the-shelf-hardware, and Open Fronthaul is opening the game with third party RU vendors.”
It’s too soon to say which cloud options Orange will settle on. It is developing its own Orange telco cloud strategy, seeking a horizontalization of that cloud platform. Py said the operator would have to see how it is maturing, “but by default we will consider that is our option.”
In 2024 it lab tested Nokia’s cloud RAN solution, after evaluating solutions by Samsung and Ericsson in 2023. In early 2025 it said it would take a look at Nokia’s Cloud RAN technology operated on a hybrid cloud infrastructure from AWS. This would see AWS’ Graviton3-based edge servers host upper layer vRAN workloads, with Nokia’s SmartNIC SoC plugin handling the L1 acceleration.
As the November 2024 blog post makes clear, Orange has taken a measured approach to the potential introduction of Open RAN and Cloud RAN. In 2021 it launched its Open RAN integration centre. In 2023, it included Open RAN as part of its experimental Pikeo 5G SA network, built with AWS, Mavenir and Dell. Alongside this it has been working with Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung, in tandem with server and chipset providers, to increase the capacity and energy efficiency of their Open RAN complaint solutions. Orange verifies this progress in its laboratory.
Late in 2023 Orange announced an Open RAN sharing trial with Vodafone in Romania, using Samsung’s vRAN. It expanded this trial in 2024 to include 2G support, as Samsung added that crucial capability.
At the time, Orange’s Arnaud Vamparys, Chief technology Innovation Officer, says, “This commercial deployment with Samsung could serve as a blueprint for other deployments in Europe.”
That certainly looks to be the case, as the Samsung blueprint is the one that is being tested in the France pilot, pending further site expansions.
SMO now?
A further aspect to throw into the mix is that Orange is considering whether to include a renewal tender for its 20-country C-SON solution alongside the RAN tender. It could move the C-SON elements to the Non Real Time RIC within an SMO solution. Or it could just update its C-SON. Perhaps it is of interest, then, that Samsung made note of its SMO solution – CognitiV Network Operations Suite (NOS) – providing the automated operations element of the Open RAN trial in France.
