Samsung squeezed out of VodafoneThree’s £2bn UK network refresh

• Recently formed UK operator VodafoneThree is revamping its national mobile network as part of its planned 10-year, £11bn investment in a 5G standalone (5G SA) network
• Ericsson emerges as the main vendor partner, supplying most of the radio access network (RAN) gear and a nationwide core platform, with Nokia also playing a major role
• But there’s no role in the UK rollout for Samsung, which had been key to Vodafone UK’s now seemingly abandoned Open RAN programme 
• But the South Korean vendor will be a “strategic partner” for Vodafone Group’s broader ‘Spring 6’ RAN refresh across continental Europe

VodafoneThree, the UK operator formed in June by the £16.5bn merger of Vodafone UK and Three, has selected Ericsson and Nokia, but omitted Samsung, for a major £2bn-plus national radio access network (RAN) refresh that is part of its planned 10-year, £11bn investment in a 5G standalone (5G SA) network. 

As part of its commitments to get M&A approvals for its merger, which reduced the number of infrastructure-based mobile network operators in the UK from four to three, the operator, which is 51% owned by Vodafone Group and 49% owned by CK Hutchison, pledged to regulators that it would invest £11bn in a major network upgrade and expansion – see Then there were three… VodafoneThree lands in the UK.

VodafoneThree’s plan is to “front load” its rollout and investments, with 90% of the UK population covered by 5G SA services by 2028 and 99.95% having access to the operator’s 5G SA services by 2034. 

That 5G SA investment programme has now begun, and while it should shock no one that Ericsson and Nokia are heavily involved, it’s a little surprising that Samsung Networks, which has been at the heart of Vodafone UK’s initial Open RAN deployments in recent years, has been sidelined. 

That decision appears to call time on Vodafone’s Open RAN plans in the UK. It also calls into question whether the “shared ambition” of the UK government and the country’s mobile operators to have 35% of mobile traffic running across Open RAN technology by 2030 is also consigned to the strategic scrapheap. One of the drivers for that commitment was to ensure mobile network supplier diversity and avoid a scenario where the supply of the UK’s critical mobile network infrastructure isn’t too reliant on just a couple of suppliers, but increasingly the UK is becoming a de facto Ericsson/Nokia duopoly as Samsung now doesn’t feature in any rollout plans and Huawei is being phased out of 5G networks by 2027 to meet UK legal guidelines.   

While Samsung has been overlooked in the UK, Vodafone Group has been quick to point out (in a separate note sent to the media) that the South Korean vendor is one of its “strategic” partners for the broader ‘Spring 6’ RAN refresh across continental Europe. (More on that later.)   

Ericsson’s and Nokia’s share of the spoils 

The £2bn-plus VodafoneThree investment includes spending with Ericsson, Nokia and a group of local network planning, design and deployment services specialists, namely Beacon Communication Services, Circet Wireless, M Group and WHP Telecoms.

Ericsson is to provide a national core platform and the radio units for 10,000 of the 17,000 sites to be rolled out in an eight-year deal valued at 12.5bn Swedish Krona ($1.33bn/£985m).  

In its own press release about the deal, the Swedish vendor noted it will supply “new” 5G RAN systems, comprising “compact, AI and energy-optimised radio hardware; smart multi-band antennas; and energy-efficient basebands”. For the core systems, Ericsson will supply its “dual-mode 5G core solution, IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), and Ericsson cloud-native infrastructure solution”. 

The vendor says its radio and core technology “will exclusively cover the four UK capital cities – London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast – and other major population centres including Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, Aberdeen, Hull and Bournemouth.” 

Nokia, meanwhile, will provide its AirScale RAN technology for about 7,000 sites. “This includes the latest generation of ultra-performance Habrok massive MIMO radios, multiband Pandion remote radio heads, and baseband solutions to support future bandwidth and capacity requirements,” it noted in its press release.  

The Finnish vendor will “also modernise part of VodafoneThree’s voice core”, “maintain the existing Three UK core for years to come” (via a separate contract) and supply its “intelligent network management system, MantaRay NM, which provides a consolidated network view for optimal monitoring and management”.

Samsung’s exclusion and the apparent Open RAN u-turn

The decision not to include Samsung in the UK network modernisation programme marks the end of one of Vodafone’s main Open RAN initiatives. The operator has been very bullish for the past five or six years about the potential benefits of deploying open, disaggregated RAN technology and had selected Samsung as its key partner for its so-called “golden cluster” deployment in south-west England that was set to kickstart the replacement of Huawei RAN technology at about 2,500 sites across the UK (a task that now seems to have fallen to Nokia) – see Vodafone starts swapping Huawei gear for Open RAN systems.

In September 2023, Andrea Donà, who was chief network officer at Vodafone UK and who now holds that same role at VodafoneThree, stated: “Open RAN is a central pillar to our network strategy for numerous reasons. Most importantly, we see this as a vehicle for transformation, opening doors that would otherwise have been closed.”

Have those doors now been voluntarily closed in the UK? Or are Ericsson and Nokia making certain pledges in their RAN roadmaps for VodafoneThree? We’re hoping to find out from Donà (who was not available for comment as this article was published). 

As for Samsung, its work in the UK may be over (for now), but Vodafone Group noted in an email to the media that it has “selected a number of strategic partners, including Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia, to jointly deliver a future-ready network infrastructure covering 15 countries across Europe and Africa”. (The operator decided not to mention Huawei in its email but the Chinese vendor is part of the telco’s ongoing RAN plans, particularly, but not exclusively, in Africa.)

That “future-ready network” plan refers to the much-vaunted and long-awaited group-wide ‘Spring 6’ RAN refresh that, at one point, was due to cover 170,000 sites in multiple markets. The plan was always to “widely deploy Open RAN across Europe”, where Vodafone used to have about 100,000 mobile sites, with the aim of having at least 30% of those European sites running on Open RAN technology by 2030” – see Vodafone’s massive network refresh will be a bellwether for Open RAN.

But Vodafone Group is smaller these days – it sold its operations in Spain to Zegona Communications and its business in Italy to Swisscom – and now the UK plan no longer includes an obvious Open RAN component. 

The operator, though, is still talking up its commitment to open, disaggregated RAN architectures. It says its “focus is on extending and enhancing connectivity to more people in more places using advanced [RAN] networks built on open network architecture and new energy-efficient software and hardware. This involves the deployment of Open RAN at scale in Europe as a continuation of an established programme running for several years, as well as new-generation single RAN – the ability to combine multiple technologies at the same mobile base station.” 

The “at scale” Open RAN part of the plan, which is believed to involve thousands of mainly new sites, is where Samsung is set to play a role and the South Korean vendor emailed a statement to the media to highlight its ongoing role in Vodafone Group’s plans. 

“While we respect VodafoneThree’s decision to consolidate their existing vendor relationships, the transition has opened significant opportunities for us to expand our presence in Europe as a major vendor awarded in Vodafone’s Spring 6 tender,” the vendor noted. “This development allows us to support Vodafone’s Open RAN deployment at scale across Europe. Samsung will deliver 4G/5G virtualised Open RAN, an AI-powered CognitiV Network Operations Suite (automation and AI apps), and SI [systems integration] services at scale, across multiple countries in Europe. We continue to see Open RAN interest and growth across the globe, including Europe.”

Quite what “at scale” actually means for Samsung and the other vendors that have supported its Open RAN engagements with Vodafone to date – namely, Dell, Wind River and Intel – remains to be seen. 

Overall, though, Vodafone’s decision to work with just two traditional RAN vendors in the UK and to seemingly stick mainly with its existing vendor roster for its existing network topology across Europe and Africa doesn’t suggest that the RAN hegemony enjoyed by Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia is under any serious threat.    

– Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV