Vodafone and Nokia are strengthening their partnership, planning to run a commercial 5G Open Radio Access Network (RAN) pilot in Italy for the first time.

Bringing together Nokia, one of the world’s largest RAN providers, and Vodafone’s pan-European network, will provide a platform for more independent software providers, start-ups, and local companies to enter the fray using open APIs.

Covering a cluster of sites in northern Italy, the pilot will involve Nokia containerised baseband software running on Red Hat OpenShift, an industry leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, hosted on the latest generation Dell PowerEdge XR8000 servers. Designed for Open RAN and mobile edge computing workloads, the Dell PowerEdge servers will support a Smart Network Interface Card (NIC) for Layer 1 processing developed by Nokia in cooperation with Marvell.

This Open RAN deployment is the first of its kind in Italy and builds on the two companies’ vision to develop a fully automated and programmable network that can respond quickly to our customers’ needs. Vodafone and Nokia are now focussing on building open and interoperable networks to meet enterprise and consumer demand for highly responsive 5G services built on AI and extended reality.

“Today’s announcement reinforces Vodafone’s commitment to supporting the EU digital economy with the deployment of customer-focussed Open RAN networks. Through greater collaboration, Vodafone and Nokia will also foster a new developer ecosystem in our home markets by providing a live software-based open network on which to launch innovative products and services for our customers”, said Alberto Ripepi, Chief Network Officer at Vodafone.

“Nokia’s collaborative anyRAN approach means that Communication Service Providers (CSPs) can deploy Cloud RAN with the server hardware and CaaS layer of their choice. Together with our ecosystem partners, we are committed to providing more choice and a higher performance in Open RAN solutions to our customers than they will see from other RAN suppliers”, commented Mark Atkinson, Head of Radio Access Networks at Nokia.