Aiming to disrupt the dominance of traditional telecoms equipment suppliers, Vodafone has reportedly partnered with Intel Corp. and other silicon manufacturers to develop its own chip architecture for the emerging OpenRAN network technology.

For the uninitiated, OpenRAN enables operators to mix and match providers in their radio networks, presenting a challenge to Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia which depend on proprietary technology to expand their foothold in the global telecoms equipment industry.

Since some governments have restricted or discouraged the use of Huawei's equipment in national networks, OpenRAN development has gained traction.

Vodafone's initiative, based in Malaga at its digital innovation and R&D center, will also help the European Union improve its chip industry as well as double its share of worldwide production to 20% after losing ground to Asian and U.S. vendors.

Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone's director of network architecture, stated that OpenRAN would allow the mobile operator to quickly introduce new digital services and optimize networks with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

As OpenRAN enables software and hardware components of the radio access network to interoperate, it will expand the vendor base and lower the entry barrier.

Vodafone launched the first 5G OpenRAN site of Britain and started gaining live customer traffic earlier this month in Bath, western England. This marks the start of a bigger deployment plan that will include 2,500 sites by 2027.

The R&D center will unite 50 OpenRAN experts together with 650 software engineers, technicians, and architects in the Spanish city, where the British firm is making investments worth 225 million euros (USD 251 million) over five years.

Tenorio stated that Vodafone will develop silicon for the ARM and RISC-V instruction sets and also Intel x86, despite the fact that Intel was up to three years ahead of competitors and had already played a crucial role in the development of OpenRAN.

Qualcomm, Broadcom, ARM, and Lime Microsystems are among the other 20 companies that have joined the project, with half of the total coming from Europe.

Source Credits: https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/vodafone-to-design-chips-with-intel-for-openran-networks/89240330