Telefónica has teamed up with NEC to conduct pre-commercial Open RAN trials in the operator’s four main markets of Spain, Germany, the UK, and Brazil. “Following the successful milestones achieved through the trials in Telefónica Germany and the UK, under this agreement, NEC will serve as the prime system integrator to implement and conduct trials of multi-vendor-based Open RAN solutions with the Telefonica group’s operating companies in four global markets, planned to scale to a total of at least 800 sites for commercial use starting in 2022.” NEC will provide some of its own technology, including its open 5G massive MIMO radio units with advanced beamforming, as well as integrate network elements from several Telefónica’s Open Ran partners. In addition, Telefónica and NEC will collaborate in validating and implementing cutting-edge Open RAN technologies and various use cases at the newly established Telefónica Technology and Automation Lab in Madrid.
The Spanish giant isn’t the only major European operator with Open RAN news today. TIM, which along with its Spanish peer and others is one of the signatories to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on The Implementation of Open RAN Based Networks In Europe, has taken further steps on the road to radio access network disaggregation. Following its initial trial deployment in Faenza, announced in April, it has also set up a trial network in the southern city of Matera with help from Mavenir, MTI, Dell Technologies, Intel, and VMware. The Italian operator has also been testing 5G standalone Open RAN capabilities in its Turin labs and plans to deploy this as part of its Matera network.