Where Ericsson and Nokia ship pre-integrated products to their customers, Vodafone must assemble the different open RAN parts and ensure they work in harmony. That points to the initial complexity of open RAN rather than project delays, and Vodafone executives insist it is going as planned.
UK operators replacing Huawei with either Ericsson or Nokia have hundreds if not thousands in service. So far, however, only one site has publicly gone live. It has already named a crew of suppliers that includes Samsung (for both radio units and software), NEC (more radio units), Dell (servers), Intel (the chips in those servers) and Wind River (software management platform). Vodafone's immediate aim is to use open RAN at about 2,500 sites in the west of the UK currently supplied by Huawei. Vodafone is to build 16 to 20 open RAN sites in the seaside town of Torquay. Vodafone is a cheerleader, hoping it will inject competition into a market dominated by Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia and set to lose Huawei – in the UK's case – after a government ban. Open RAN, for the uninitiated, refers to a set of interfaces that should (in theory) allow products from multiple suppliers to be combined at the same mobile site, where today everything would usually come from one vendor's system. The golden cluster of between 16 and 20 sites is the next stage in Vodafone's open RAN plan. If Vodafone's latest mobile tower equipment runs into problems, headline writers of a certain age and persuasion will be gleefully rubbing their hands. It was also the setting for Fawlty Towers, a 1970s sitcom about an irascible hotelier who loathed guests. Home to about 65,000 people, it is rich in Huawei equipment that must be replaced under government orders, and it has enough population density (especially during the tourist season) to need advanced gear. The coastal Devonshire town clings to the leg of UK land that juts westward, its toes pointing at the Azores. Vodafone could not have picked a better place for its "golden cluster" of open RAN sites than Torquay.
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