Vodafone kicks off mega RAN tender for Europe and Africa

Vodafone has confirmed the launch of its massive radio network tender for the Group’s entire Europe and Africa footprint, as it expands its pool of trial partners for open RAN technology.

The Request for Quotation (RFQ) is purported to be the world’s largest for radio networks outside China, and will involve not just Vodafone but its strategic partner and largest shareholder United Arab Emirates-based e&.

A Group spokesperson told TelcoTitans that the process started this month, and while there is not a fixed deadline, a procurement of this size “typically takes around nine to twelve months”.

Plans to issue an RFQ in April this year were revealed by Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone’s Director of Network Architecture, at the Fyuz event in October 2023. The tender will cover the Group’s 170,000 sites across Europe and Africa.

However, with the Group’s pending exits from Italy and Spain, it is not clear whether these markets will be included in the RFQ or if the total site count remains at 170,000 as per the original plan.

Adding another dimension to the large procurement, Vodafone is including e&, in the process as part of the strategic partnership the pair formed in May 2023. Group Chief Executive Margherita Della Valle said in February that “e& is going to join us so that we have better results for all”.

Open RAN, supplier diversity on the agenda

Vodafone is a vocal supporter of open RAN technology and views the supplier refresh as an opportunity to advance its disaggregated strategy. The operator aims to procure 30% of the tender with open RAN technology, which is in line with its target to have 30% of its European masts based on the technology by 2030.

The operator has deployed open RAN in Romania and the UK, and has today completed a trial in Italy. Vodafone’s Indian joint venture, Vi, has also deployed the technology at an unknown number of sites.

Italian job done

The Italian trial, first announced in October 2023, is notable because it expanded Vodafone’s pool of test partners to include Nokia. It was also said to be the first deployment of Nokia RAN software running on commercial off-the-shelf hardware servers from Dell.

The three-month test put Nokia’s AirScale Massive MIMO radios, baseband software, and MantaRay Networks Management system through their paces and showed the “maturity” of Nokia’s “anyRAN” approach. The trial was conducted on the operator’s live 5G standalone network in Arcisate and Sernio, where open RAN sites were connected to Vodafone’s test centre in Milan. The functional and performance results were “comparable” with standard 5G RAN.

Commenting on the Italian trial, Tenorio emphasised the importance of “fostering a diverse ecosystem of partners and solutions” and the benefits of open RAN, which include “increased choice, enhanced energy efficiency, higher network capacity, and improved performance for customers”.