Dell Technologies is the latest named vendor participating in Vodafone’s five-year plan to deployment open radio access network (RAN) equipment across Europe.

Dell is providing its PowerEdge XR8000 series servers to the deployment, specifically its XR8620t and XR8720t servers using Intel’s Xeon 6 system-on-chip (SoC). That latter model was recently unveiled and is targeted at edge and telecom deployments.

Vodafone is also using Dell’s Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite (DTIAS) to provide infrastructure management within the open RAN architecture. Dell unveiled that platform in early 2024, touting its ability to automate the deployment and management of multivendor deployments.

Vodafone’s rolling 5G unveiling

Dell’s named inclusion continues Vodafone’s ongoing unveiling of vendor partners supplying equipment for its wide-ranging open RAN deployments. The carrier earlier this month named Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung as suppliers of various components across Vodafone’s global footprint.

Ericsson was selected as the sole RAN vendor across Ireland, the Netherlands, and Portugal, while becoming a major partner in Vodafone’s Germany, Romania, and Egypt markets. This includes Ericsson providing massive multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) radios, RAN compute, and 5G-Advanced RAN software solutions.

Vodafone is also using Ericsson’s Intelligent Automation Platform (EIAP) for multivendor RAN management.

Nokia is supplying equipment from its AirScale RAN portfolio, including massive MIMO radios and baseband and remote radio head (RRH) solutions driven by Nokia’s ReefShark SoC platform. That equipment will be deployed across Vodafone’s operations in Africa.

Vodafone tapped Samsung as the primary supplier for open RAN and virtualized RAN (vRAN) deployments within Europe. This includes the use of Samsung’s equipment being deployed on top of Ericsson’s management platform.

Vodafone more recently named Aptiv-owned Wind River to provide the containers-as-a-service (CaaS) layer running on top of Samsung’s software. The Wind River platform provides both a Kubernetes and container-based distributed cloud architecture that will allow Vodafone to more efficiently power its distributed edge networks.

“We are focused on delivering the best experience for our customers by investing in new technologies and architectures, including 5G-Advanced, open RAN, direct-to-device satellite, and RAN automation on our journey towards building robust and autonomous networks,” Francisco (Paco) Martin, director of mobile access engineering at Vodafone, noted in a statement tied to the Dell unveiling. “Working with Dell reinforces this commitment, strengthening our open RAN network with Dell solutions, and providing a foundation for exceptional customer services and innovation.”