As the UK’s band-of-a-generation Oasis cranked their three chords round the world this year on their mega reunion tour, one song in particular re-grabbed hold of Gen X’s hearts and boot-cut jeans.
Don’t Look Back in Anger always did contain one of the more poignant, self-fulfilling lyrics to fall from Noel Gallagher’s pen: “Please don’t put your life in the hands/ Of a rock ‘n’ roll band/ Who’ll throw it all away.”
Perhaps we could say the same of companies attempting to get innovative technology past the procurement departments of major mobile network operators. Do not put your lives in the hands of this band.
Slide away
Certainly that might be the view of those who were hoping that the way in which technology and innovation is nurtured and deployed within major telco networks might be changing as a result.
With more of a slide away than the momentum of a supernova, the results of Vodafone’s Spring 6 tender, announced six months into the five year investment cycle the tender services, and by which it sets up the contracts for its next five years of RAN development, have now been officially announced.
Samsung gets a decent win in Germany which, if fulfilled, could see it deploy “several thousand” sites as the network is upgraded and expanded. A Vodafone Group statement said that the operator would also be working with Samsung to develop several thousand more Open RAN sites in other European countries.
A release from Vodafone Germany said, “The focus is on a mix of new locations and conversion measures in the course of the regular mobile phone expansion. In spring 2026, the Hanseatic city of Wismar in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is to become the first city fully equipped with OpenRAN in the Vodafone mobile network.”
On the radio unit side, Fujitsu too may get some new business from the tender. It said that its 1Finity business will provide Vodafone with Open RAN radio units, presumably in Germany where the bulk of Vodafone’s Open RAN efforts are initially to be focussed.
Stand by me
Outside of that, though, it’s kind of business as usual.
The biggest change, and perhaps it is not one to discount just yet, is indeed that Samsung win – meaning it is the only RAN layer vendor getting significantly more business.
Nokia, which following the sale of Vodafone Italy has very little Vodafone business in Europe outside of Albania, put out essentially a status quo statement. Effectively the company wants the market to know that there are few big winners or losers, most vendors are where they were pre-tender (Samsung aside, of course). That means that Nokia will continue to deploy with Vodacom in Africa where it is the major supplier, and it also mentioned Ethiopia and Kenya in its release. Separately, of course, the company has roared back into Vodafone UK as it won a big deal a couple of weeks back with VodafoneThree, which involved the scrapping of that country’s Open RAN deal with Samsung.
Ericsson had more specifics to announce, saying it would be sole RAN vendor in Ireland, Netherlands, and Portugal, as well as a major vendor in Germany, Romania, and Egypt. The company said that its deployed Massive MIMO radios and RAN Compute solutions will be Open RAN compatible, although there’s little sense from Vodafone’s announcements that it sees being Open RAN compatible as a key part of this selection.
Ericsson too will continue to develop its RAN management SMO layer, EIAP, as it rolls out those RAN deployments. The EIAP can host third part rApps from other vendors, and those developed in-house by operator customers. That may be relevant as Vodafone Germany moves to a RAN management platform that cuts out Huawei’s RAN controller by 2029, even as it retains Huawei in the access layer.
TMN understands that Huawei has increased its position in Africa, where it is Vodafone’s leading vendor.
So what happened to the Open RAN promise?
This was a tender which, when it was launched a full six years ago, offered the potential for 30% of the 170,000 sites that Vodafone owned at the time to be moved to an open RAN platform.
“This is a really significant opportunity for Open RAN to scale. We are willing to swap out sites if we have to. Our ambition is for modern, up to date, lower cost kit in every site across 14 countries. Stay tuned, it may be a significant acceleration of the Open RAN ecosystem,” said Santiago Tenorio, then Head of Network Strategy, Vodafone Group,
This would not only enable Vodafone to become strategically more resilient, by broadening its potential base of RAN suppliers but, importantly, it would also enable it to benefit from innovation brought to it from sources outside its normal roster of RAN suppliers.
The technology strategists at Vodafone seemed absolutely sure this is what they wanted. A lab in Malaga tested chip platforms from a range of chip players as Vodafone grappled with the technicalities of RAN performance on COTS hardware, such as defining what hardware acceleration was required, how best to do that, and how portable the L1 software layer needed to be.
Trials in the UK in particular, but also in Turkey and Romania and others, grappled with the development of a replicable, production-ready Open RAN platform.
RAN optimisation company Cohere Technologies was given hope that as it moved through testing, a move to more open RAN platforms would be good for companies like it, offering potential for integration with the RIC element in such an architecture. In time, that switched to a model that would see it integrated with the lower layer RAN of OEMs themselves. But Spring 6 was still the timeline for that integration and delivery.
Before he moved to Verizon, but after AT&T did its mega deal with AT&T, Vodafone’s Santiago Tenorio said that if all this effort achieved was just one more vendor, then that would be a loss for Vodafone. Worth remembering those words: “We started for optionality in the supply chain, so we need to get that. Yes it’s good news that Ericsson is going Open RAN and we hope we can drive that to be as good as the one we are rolling out in the UK. But we need at least one if not two other alternatives ready.”
And as recently as June this year, a Vodafone Open RAN leader called for support for the Open RAN ecosystem, and said that operators should invest in Open RAN platforms in order to enable new players to scale. “I’ve got class-leading radios today which are open-ready, sitting on roadmaps,” he said. The issue is, European operators are not providing the scale opportunity for the ecosystem.
And even in today’s announcements, there are still very positive noises about the benefit of introducing an Open RAN platform – vendor diversity and speed of innovation.
Tanja Richter, Chief Technology Officer of Vodafone, said, “Thanks to open standards, we can combine the best software and hardware from different providers. With this and with the help of AI, we accelerate the automation in the network and bring new, innovative functions faster and easier to our mobile phone users.”
The dead hand of procurement?
So what happened? One senior industry figure who was connected to the process proposed the view that Vodafone is still a procurement-led operator. In other words, there’s a disconnect between what the technology department might be communicating, and what happens when contracts go into procurement. That would certainly explain the length of time the process has taken, but also some of the outcomes. But of course it is impossible to know for sure.
Of course, nobody ever expected an outcome where there were five or six different in-country Open RAN vendors connected to a stable of five or six different RU vendors. That would be pretty unmanageable. Even in its work in the UK Vodafone honed in on a repeatable blueprint with just one main Open RAN vendor and one or two differing RU vendors. But six months into its five year investment cycle, the outcome of all the work so far, the proto-typing, the field pilots, the Malaga research and more, is a promise of several thousand sites for Samsung, and some RUs for Fujitsu.
Maybe it was always supposed to end up that way. The threat of the main vendors having something to lose was more important than the ability to find new vendors. Here’s Tenorio again, in 2024:
“We need a new contract for every market and every site. Even if the market stayed the same on single RAN at every site, we still need new contracts to keep on buying kit. So that’s a tender. And then once we have a tender we need to think of a strategy. Ours is still to introduce 30% of Open RAN. That would be a reasonable outcome: in some cases that will mean shuffling the allocation of the market to different players and in some cases it might stay the same.
“It’s obvious that we would make sure that every player has an incentive and a threat. It’s a natural thing to do – to make sure that every player has something to win and something to lose. 170k sites are up in the air. It’s a big bet and you need to drive competition. If you start with the allocations that vendors keep what they’ve got, you won’t get the best prices.”
Innovation restriction?
The wider issue here, and it is by no means a structural issue that should be placed solely at Vodafone’s door – its processes are just a symptom of the imperatives of the market – is that it is still very, very difficult to get to a situation where operators can take advantage of innovation that isn’t fed through the funnel of their main vendors. And ultimately, however realistic a view that may be, it doesn’t bode well for the long term health of the industry. How the industry innovates and engages with innovators, needs to change. And as AI and ML technologies continue to leap forward, that’s only going to become more important.
Of course Ericsson and Nokia and Huawei are very skilled companies with great R&D and leading capabilities in many areas. But they’re not the whole landscape, and even they would say they should not be the funnel through which innovation is filtered into operator networks. More open platforms offered a chance for change: they still do.
And so yes, Samsung can wait, while for many we know it’s too late. Don’t look back in anger? For some that is already proving difficult.
