BARCELONA – Samsung Electronics and Vodafone completed the first call utilizing Samsung’s virtualized radio access network (vRAN) platform and Intel Xeon 6 system-on-chip (SoC), building on the pair's ongoing open RAN deployment in Germany.

As revealed at this week's Mobile World Congress (MWC) event, the test call was conducted using Samsung's Cognitiv Network Operations Suite (NOS) and the Intel Xeon 6 SoC to handle workloads and AI-driven applications across 2G, 4G, and 5G networks on a single high-performance server. The demo was achieved in collaboration with Dell Technologies on the server front, alongside Wind River's Studio cloud platform, with commercial deployment planned for this year.

The virtualized win for Samsung follows its selection as Vodafone's primary partner for large-scale open RAN and vRAN deployments within Europe. Vodafone Germany was revealed last year to be rolling out one of Europe’s largest open RAN deployments, with Samsung to kit out thousands of sites across the continent following the German deployment, which so far has seen completion in Hannover with Wismar to follow.

Speaking with SDxCentral at MWC 2026, Kali Pickens, senior director and head of marketing for Samsung Electronics America's Networks Business, said the vRAN demo is part of Vodafone's big open RAN push.

"In addition to that, they'll be deploying Samsung Cognitiv NOS, and they've done the first European field call using Intel Granite Rapids," Pickens said, referring to Intel's Xeon 6 series processors.

On partner Intel, Pickens said that while Samsung is chip agnostic, Granite Rapids makes an ideal companion when it comes to vRAN.

"While it has a higher number of cores to support more use cases and more AI processing, it also allows you to support multiple sites with a single server," Pickens explained. "That's huge when you think about overall total cost and ownership for the operator. Now they're not having to support a whole data center rack at a cell site.

"As we think of the trajectory of the industry, everybody's looking to save on opex and capex as these technologies continue to evolve and innovation pushes forward," Pickens added. "We're going to see more of that coming through."