Samsung has moved to reassure the market that its apparent ditching by VodafoneThree UK is not a sign of what will happen across the rest of Europe.
The UK side of the Vodafone business (VodafoneThree) announced today that as it consolidates and updates the networks of VodafoneThree, it is going to be giving the majority of its RAN estate to Ericsson and Nokia. Ericsson’s getting about 10,000 sites, Nokia 7,000. (Vodafone said that the remaining 8,000 sites would be fulfilled within its Beacon network sharing agreement with VMO2).
That’s bad news for Samsung, which had been working with Vodafone as the prime vendor to create an Open RAN build out to replace 2,500 Huawei-based rural and suburban sites. After trials and pilots going back to 2019, the companies had opened up a “golden cluster” of a few vRAN sites in the south west of England, built on Intel-based hardware with Wind River’s cloud operating system and Samsung vRAN software and radio units, but the wider scale rollout never materialised. After turning on its first macro site in 2019, Vodafone moved to ensure Samsung could support 2G, and then continued to demonstrate through live pilots in the southwest as it came up with a deployable blueprint.
No mention of Open RAN
Samsung’s Open RAN project within VodafoneThree is over – there’s no sign of its future being mentioned in today’s announcement from VodafoneThree – and while the operator said that Nokia and Ericson would “make up the majority, but not the entirety, of VodafoneThree’s network build”, even then there was no mention of its Open RAN plans or of Samsung. And there was no mention either of Ericsson and Nokia being leant on to commit to the support of open interfaces going forward, such as has happened with Ericsson at AT&T, for example.
VodafoneThree UK told TMN, “We have selected the vendors that will help us build the UK’s best network at pace and at scale.”
To soften the blow of its UK exclusion, Vodafone Group has clearly given the nod to Samsung to reveal that it is going to be named as a major vendor in its Spring 6 tender, a Europe-wide and years long tender which concluded earlier this year, and which was originally intended to foster greater innovation in the network, and to support a wider RAN ecosystem. In fact the tender has taken place over a time frame that has seen the departure of Vodafone Italy and Spain from Vodafone Group’s properties.
Spring 6 tender teaser
As it absorbed the UK news, Samsung was able to reveal that despite being ditched in that country it is, in its words, still “a major vendor awarded in Vodafone’s Spring 6 tender”. The company said it would deliver its RAN, SMO suite and system integration services at scale, “across multiple countries in Europe”. TMN understands that this extends to thousands of sites across the remaining European assets in the network group, which includes Albania, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Romania.
For its part, Vodafone Group said in a statement to TMN, “Vodafone has selected a number of strategic partners, including Samsung, Ericsson, and Nokia, to jointly deliver a future-ready network infrastructure covering 15 countries across Europe and Africa. This involves the deployment of Open RAN at scale in Europe as a continuation of an established programme running for several years, as well as new generation Single RAN – the ability to combine multiple technologies at the same mobile base station.”
So it is clear Samsung is going to get a share of the Vodafone Group tender, especially where it is targeting Open RAN. But for now it will not escape notice that the UK, where its blueprint was established, appears to have turned its face on Open RAN.
