Vodafone Reserves Big Role for Open RAN in Upcoming 100,000-Site Tender

Vodafone’s Santiago Tenorio in a Light Reading article talks about Mavenir’s success in becoming a RAN player and how massive MIMO jointly developed by Mavenir and Qualcomm is “dramatically better” at energy efficiency than anything Tenorio has seen from the big incumbents.

When it comes to fomenting competition through open RAN, Tenorio clearly prioritizes this subsector for radio units over software and servers. “Radios attract more than 50% of the wallet share,” he said. That partly explains his determination to bring both the Nordic vendors around and offers clues about the nature of Vodafone’s future deployment.

“It is very important that we get Ericsson and Nokia to do it because if you open interfaces then apart from having more software vendors you can have ten times more radio vendors,” he said. “That will not be limited to just Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung. You will have Mavenir, Fujitsu, NEC, even ZTE where you can use them. That is where the majority of the money is going and that is a layer where you want to have competition.”

Elsewhere, he would be content if a more commoditized server market included just Dell, HPE and Supermicro. And he reckons a minimum of two players are needed for containers-as-a-service (CaaS) platforms, citing Wind River, Red Hat and VMware as the key competitors in that area. On RAN software, he calls out Samsung and Mavenir, besides Ericsson and Nokia.