Orange and Vodafone agreed to build an Open Radio Access Network (RAN) with RAN sharing in rural parts of Europe where they both have mobile networks.
The first commercial sites to be deployed under this agreement are planned to start this year in a rural area of Romania, near Bucharest.
The operates are currently working to individually select strategic vendors for this initial build phase.
Michaël Trabbia, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Orange, said: “Orange is excited to co-operate with Vodafone on a first open 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, Open 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.”
