Vodafone, in collaboration with Intel and others, has begun the latest phase of its OpenRAN deployment strategy by installing the technology on 16 mobile masts in Exmouth and Torquay in South West England. This deployment phase, deemed the “Golden Cluster,” represents the first time in Europe that OpenRAN has been deployed in a live urban environment, providing live connectivity services to all local consumer and business customers.
Vodafone and Intel have been pioneers of Open radio access networks (OpenRAN). The multiyear, ongoing collaboration between these industry leaders has made significant contributions toward the industry’s transformation to virtualized radio networks. Intel’s hardware and software investments have enabled efficient execution of RAN workloads on each new generation of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, demonstrating frequency-scaling headroom, new performance levels and technology integration that help eliminate the need for external accelerators and specialized components.
Our long-standing collaboration with Intel is entering an exciting new phase that will support the potential for OpenRAN in new ways. Moving OpenRAN from rural to the more complex urban environments is a critical step to ensure we can drive towards a more sustainable ecosystem with more diversity, resiliency and innovation.”
Read the full announcement on the Vodafone website.
Vodafone has started commercial OpenRAN deployments with Intel-based general-purpose processor platforms running 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors as the processor of choice in the Vodafone effort to build 2,500 OpenRAN sites in the U.K.
Join Intel and Vodafone at 8 a.m. PST, Dec. 12, for a joint webinar, “The Journey to a Cloud Native Software-Defined RAN Architecture,” and download the accompanying white paper to learn more about the companies’ collaborative vRAN/OpenRAN innovations.