Vodafone chief gushes over OpenRAN, says commercial deployments to start this year

Last year Vodafone bet big on OpenRAN, announcing it would shift a huge portion of its tower estate to the standards-based tech. Now Andrea Donà, the telco's director of network and development, has shed some light on how this will work. Speaking to Telecom TV, Donà said Vodafone had already deployed two OpenRAN sites to its …

[Flak]

Disaggregation, Standardisation, Commoditisation

Definitely the right direction of travel.

I am sure there will be some teething problems and it will be interesting to see how tight OpenRAN specifications are for true, cross-vendor interoperability.

Remember 'standards' like DPNSS which offered basic baseline features, but much of the meaningful stuff was still vendor specific? Or in the early days of VoIP you had two competing standards for DTMF transport - in band and out of band - and good luck to you if you connected two systems with different implementations that needed to 'talk' DTMF across them...

[NeilPost]

Re: Disaggregation, Standardisation, Commoditisation

How’s that going to work...

“ Last year Vodafone bet big on OpenRAN, announcing it would shift a huge portion of its tower estate to the standards-based tech. Now Andrea Donà, the telco's director of network and development, has shed some light on how this will work.”

Shirley this is the same towers business they (and others) are flogging at break-neck speed and you’ll end up like Telcos virtual and a Tower’s Openreach’s with the touchy-feeley stuff.

For the towers/mast businesses consolidation and consolidating multiple operators onto a mast site and perhaps same antennas is where they will squeeze costs and generate increases in revenue and leave the mucky CellCo/call routing down to the software level??

More tower sites serving multiple customers can only be a good thing though in broadening coverage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's software-based

It will be easy to bork with a software update? ;-)

More seriously, the adoption of an open system should be a good thing which will hopefully drive down installation costs.

[Pascal Monett]

"you can do most of your operations remotely"

I hope that they have baked security in from the start and bolted it on as usual, because if you can do stuff remotely, so can a hacker.

[jonathan keith]

Re: "you can do most of your operations remotely"

hacker criminal

FTFY :o)

[Klimt's Beast Would]

One typo away from A Flock of Seagulls...

...coz 'O' is next to 'I' on the keyboard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpfWORQWhU

I walk along OpenRanavenue,

I never thought I'd meet a network (architecture) like you,

Meet a network (architecture) like you,

With 5G masts and swap out kit,

The kind of kit that hypnotizes me through,

Your kit hypnotizes me through

And I ran, I ran so far Huawei,

I just ran, I ran all night and day,

I couldn't get Huawei