The first commercial O-RAN sites to be deployed under this agreement are planned for a rural area of Romania

European carriers Orange and Vodafone have reached an agreement to build an Open Radio Access Network (RAN) with RAN sharing in rural parts of Europe where they both have mobile networks.

In a release, the two telcos said that the first commercial sites to be deployed under this agreement are planned to start this year in a rural area of Romania, near the city of Bucharest.  Orange and Vodafone said they are currently working to individually vendors for this initial build phase.

The partners noted that this announcement reinforces their respective commitments to rollout O-RAN as the technology of choice for future mobile networks across Europe—and to support the European Commission’s target to have 5G in all populated areas by 2030.

The carriers also highlighted that this model will serve as a blueprint to extend 4G and 5G networks to rural communities across Europe.

Michaël Trabbia, chief technology and innovation officer at Orange, said: “Orange is excited to co-operate with Vodafone on a first O-RAN sharing deployment in Romania, which is a significant milestone on the road to wide-scale open RAN adoption across Europe. It is a major step towards agile and fully-automated networks, unleashing the potential of virtualization and AI to boost performance while driving both infrastructure and operational costs down.

“In particular, O-RAN is a great opportunity to take network sharing to a whole new dimension, with even higher operator differentiation thanks to the ability for each of the partners to tune its network more independently according to its promises towards its own customers,” the executive added.

Meanwhile, Alberto Ripepi, chief network officer of Vodafone, said that the combination of resources will enable the carriers to reduce the cost of hardware, minimize fuel consumption and the need for duplicate sites while eradicating coverage “not-spots”.

“Open RAN also means we can more quickly add new software features without necessarily replacing the hardware components, which is often the case today. This minimizes any disruption to service and ensures customers in rural areas receive the same upgrades as those in the cities,” Ripepi said.

This agreement enables the sharing of all hardware components, while both carriers can independently manage their own RAN software on a common cloud infrastructure. As a result, the partners said, each company can tailor services and capacity to their specific customer needs, while ensuring a strong and secure isolation between each operator’s data.

In 2021, European operators Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone had committed to support the rollout of O-RAN in future mobile networks across Europe.

The four carriers signed a memorandum of understanding in which they have expressed their individual commitment to the implementation and deployment of O- RAN solutions.

The operators had said they will also work together with existing and new ecosystem partners, industry bodies like the O-RAN Alliance and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), as well as European policy makers, to ensure O-RAN quickly reaches competitive parity with traditional RAN solutions.

The four operators also said they believe that the European Commission and the national governments have an important role to play to foster and develop the Open RAN ecosystem by funding early deployments, research and development, open test lab facilities and incentivizing supply chain diversity by lowering barriers to entry for small suppliers and startups who can avail of these labs to validate open and interoperable solutions.