Vodafone claims it doubled the capacity of a 5G cell site used by multiple customers in an open radio access network (RAN) trial in the United Kingdom.

The achievement, which occured in a test laboratory, made use of a programmable, artificial intelligence-based RAN intelligent controller (RIC) that supported open RAN components from multiple vendors, including Capgemini Engineering, Cohere Technologies, Intel, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), and VMware, according to Vodafone. 

“This collaboration represents a key milestone in demonstrating the potential of RIC sitting at the heart of an open RAN installation,” the operator said in a statement. 

Multiple alliances spanning the open source, operator, and vendor communities, are increasingly targeting the RIC as a critical area of development for the proliferation of open RAN architecture. These efforts will disrupt the status quo and create opportunities for new vendors to enter the RAN infrastructure market, according to ABI Research, which expects standard RIC deployment to dominate the market in the next three to four years.

RIC and corresponding xApps, which effectively house the functionality of the RAN, are required to improve radio resource management, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna signaling arrays, network slicing, and network monitoring, the research firm wrote in a new report. The O-RAN Alliance, TIP, the Open Networking Foundation, and others are all pursuing sometimes overlapping efforts to meet those goals.

“O-RAN Alliance specified RIC framework and corresponding interfaces for both non-real-time RIC and near-real-time RIC to address further increased network service requirements from different verticals and complex RAN operation with automation,” Jiancao Hou, senior analyst at ABI Research, said in a statement.

Intelligent RAN control and automation will benefit network operations and unlock new revenue streams, but “before that happens, key stakeholders should take more active roles to test and verify the solution in terms of network reliability, security, and performance,” Hou explained. 

By running a RIC located at a multi-vendor open RAN test site, Vodafone claims it demonstrated capacity gains at a single 5G site with the aid of Cohere’s Spectrum Multiplier Multi-User MIMO scheduler. Those results led Vodafone to conclude that it can double capacity in a commercial low-band 5G network and achieve capacity gains up to fivefold in a mid-band massive MIMO deployment. 

The operator, which is more broadly partnering with its European counterparts to support the commercial deployment of open RAN, calling it “the technology of choice for future mobile networks,” said the test also confirmed that base station costs can be cut by up to a third in an open RAN environment.

“This initiative validates the role that this powerful new platform plays in defining open RAN as the future of networking. It boosts capacity for customers when they need it most, reduces the need for expensive hardware by a third and cuts down on energy consumption,” Francisco Martín, Vodafone’s head of open RAN, said in a statement. 

VMware provided an O-RAN Alliance compliant RIC platform that supports open APIs for third-party applications, including Cohere’s app. Capgemini’s software was used to execute multi-user MIMO actions on baseband radio functions, and Intel’s FlexRAN software provided the 5G new radio physical layer and reference architecture for the common-off-the-shelf hardware that hosted VMware’s RIC and Capgemini’s baseband, according to Vodafone.