Telecom Italia (TIM) was the last to sign up, of the five European operators that recently announced a memorandum of understanding to support Open RAN deployment and a local ecosystem. However, it has leapt ahead of its partners in that venture – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone – in deploying Open RAN equipment in a live network in Europe.
Most Open RAN roll-outs to date have been trials, or deployments in greenfield environments such as rural expansion. But TIM is implementing a system supplied by JMA Wireless and MTI in an existing live network in the city of Faenza, near Bologna in north-east Italy.
That raises the question of how its new vendors will coexist with those already active in the network. TIM has equipment from Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei but is expected to procure most of its 5G RAN from the two European suppliers. The operator said the new Open RAN equipment is not going into greenfield sites, but that widespread replacement of existing vendors was not the intention.
“The purpose of this activity in 2021 is not a vendor replacement,” the operator said. “We are locally replacing the existing 4G network and providing full interoperability with existing neighboring cells in order to cover all the Faenza area with 4G and 5G.” Orange has made similar statements about Open RAN plans not being primarily about replacing its suppliers.
This is in a 4G network, so TIM does not yet have to address the challenges of deploying open, disaggregated architectures that can meet the full performance requirements of macro 5G. But it says it will expand its roll-out to provide full coverage of Faenza – a city with a population of 70,000 – by the end of the year, and also add further cities to the project. It will move to 5G solutions in future.
So far, TIM is not boosting the ambitions of its MoU partners to encourage a local European Open RAN industry. In the past it has trialled vRAN and Open RAN with Altiostar and Nokia, and deployed a Huawei vRAN in Sicily, but this commercial deployment runs on radios from MTI of Taiwan with vRAN software from JMA Wireless of the USA.
MTI is becoming prominent in the early Open RAN market, and a proof point that the powerful Taiwanese manufacturing base can play a role in wresting control from the tier one radio OEMs. MTI is a supplier to Dish Network and a partner of Mavenir as well as JMA. JMA has a vRAN stack, from Layer 1 upwards, called XRAN.
TIM, which is reported to be excluding Huawei from its 5G procurement, said it was applying “a supplier diversification logic” and wanted to encourage “a broader industrial ecosystem”.
It added: “The initiative is covered by the signing of a memorandum of understanding last February with the main European operators to promote Open RAN technology with the aim of speeding up the implementation of new generation mobile networks, in particular 5G, cloud and edge computing.”