04 June 2024

Orange and Vodafone have successfully expanded their pilot project in certain rural areas of Romania, including fully integrated 2G virtualized RAN (vRAN) technology, an innovation representing an international first over a shared operational network (RAN sharing).

This achievement represents an important step towards the cloud migration of radio access networks, allowing network operators to consider moving their entire traditional network to fully virtualized RAN spanning 2G/4G/5G networks, in line with European requirements, especially in areas where the shutdown of 3G networks is completed or imminent. The virtualization of 2G networks represents a major step forward and an opportunity for operators, circumventing the obligation to maintain legacy 2G networks developed on specialized hardware, as well as operating virtualized 4G/5G networks as an overlay.

Orange and Vodafone have achieved this milestone alongside several Open RAN providers. Samsung provided its specialized vRAN software supporting multi-RAT – 2G, 4G and 5G, and its O-RAN compliant radios. Wind River provided the abstraction layer through Studio Cloud Platform on top of the hardware to deploy and scale the RAN software, as well as Dell Technologies, which provided Dell PowerEdge servers equipped with Intel processors and acceleration cards.

The use of Open RAN in a real environment has allowed the operators to benefit from the advantages offered by this solution, such as a high degree of automation and reduced implementation time. Open RAN technology decouples software functionalities from hardware, enabling remote modernization of mobile base stations with new features and services, faster and more cost-effectively. Additionally, in the case of RAN sharing, operators are provided with more freedom and autonomy in managing their own virtualized RAN software on a common cloud infrastructure, while network operating costs are shared. This approach reduces the need for site visits due to higher network automation levels and allows operators to differentiate themselves while maintaining cost and energy savings associated with RAN sharing.

“This first development of an operational Open RAN network in Romania represents an important step for Orange in its transition to more agile and automated, cloud-native networks. Orange will leverage this successful pilot to develop a center of expertise in Romania in the near future, to support large-scale Open RAN implementations across the Orange network in Europe in the coming years,” said Marius Maican, technology director at Orange Romania.

“With focus on customer experience we are leveraging on the Open RAN momentum to move to cloud-native networks. Open RAN fosters faster innovation and development of new features and services by allowing multiple vendors to develop in the RAN space,” said Nicolae Vilceanu, network director at Vodafone Romania.