Charlotte Kan (00:07):
Thank you for joining us and welcome. We are going to discuss the partnership between Vodafone and Wind River. And to do so, I'm delighted to be joined by Paco Martin Pinelli, who's head of Open ran at Vodafone and Paul Miller, who's Chief Technology Officer at Wind River. Paul and Paco, thank you so much for joining us. Now Paco, Vodafone has Europe's fast open ran deployment in Europe and you just announced your deployment in Romania. Both projects included collaboration with Wind River of course. So congratulations first of all, and could you tell us maybe what the key drivers for the project were?

Paco Pignatelli (00:48):
Yeah, we are very excited. It's all happening now and we wanted for this time in Vodafone to be ready to be prepared to get big in open run. So we have now a very big tender that is going to be over 170,000 sites and there is a massive opportunity for us with open run. We are going to be enabling a fantastic opportunity to have better cost and innovations. And the collaboration with Windriver has been great for that.

Paul Miller (01:19):
Thanks Paco. And I think we've certainly been involved in Open ran for many, many years in contributing our technology into that open source activity and it's been an honor to have Vodafone as a customer and we've really enjoyed working the past couple of years to get to the success that we have in that deployment.

Charlotte Kan (01:34):
And Paco, what about the benefits for your customers?

Paco Pignatelli (01:37):
One of the main principles is the ability to have innovation wherever that is. So you can have that startup company somewhere that came up with an algorithm that is going to be improving the capacity in the network. Then you can use it in your open run architecture much more easier than ever before. So it's about innovation, but it's also about cost. We need to have the opportunity to reduce the cost for us to be able to deploy more as an operator. And Open Run is certainly enabling that. We see that today with the deployments that we are having, but even more we see the opportunity for the future to reduce much more and to innovate and deliver great stuff.

Paul Miller (02:24):
Yeah, we also see that Open Ran gives the entire approach as software defined infrastructure or architecture and that enables us to bring new applications and new revenue generating ideas into service providers using the infrastructure that's built out with Open ran, for example, connected vehicle systems, right? The 5G movement is really about generating revenue and providing applications for consumers. And we have a much more flexible environment in doing that with a virtualized software solution based on Open. Ran

Charlotte Kan (02:54):
Paco, your colleagues at Vodafone have discussed how the key KPIs for Open ran either meet or exceed traditional networks and Andrea Donna said that the UK works as a blueprint for success. So how did you achieve

Paco Pignatelli (03:10):
This? Yeah, I think this is a very, very important point. We have been working with River and the other partners to get our solution and obviously we had some issues, but I have to say we dealt with them in a fantastic manner and Andrea was mentioning how the deployment was working in the UK and how good the KPIs are. But I really, really happy now because what we have been doing very recently is something slightly different. What we have in the uk, it was a deployment of the network replacing the incumbent supplier we had, but the kit that we were replacing was not exactly the latest version. So it was around for some time. So we were always thinking how would it work the comparison of the latest technology from all suppliers, hardware and software. So we've been testing here in Spain, we have a field testing city if you are L close to Madrid and we've been testing extensively our open run configuration versus traditional, and you know what the results are amazing. And open run comes always, always better than the lower part of any KPI. So I'm talking about downlink and uplink performance. Also latency for four, G for 5G SA, 5G NSA. So it comes always within the range, sometimes even exceeding the upper part of the range. So I think we can confidently say to everybody out there in the industry, every potential customer out there for you guys that the open run is working, the performance is okay, we tick the box.

Paul Miller (05:03):
Yeah, we were really pleased to see this as well. This is very real world testing. The sites we're in a city in Spain physically deployed and set up a configuration that allowed Vodafone to test identically the same day with the same atmospheric conditions. Testing against traditional RAN versus open ran and then seeing the KPIs. I was of course incredibly pleased to see a superior performance with open ran. And this is a real payoff for the work that we've done together over the past several years doing incredible optimizations on the infrastructure, getting down to single core support, doing these sort of things has really resulted in those KPIs being superior and it's really nice to see the promise of RAN coming to fruition.

Paco Pignatelli (05:43):
Indeed.

Charlotte Kan (05:44):
And of course Wind River plays a role in this deployment. So can you tell us why you decided to work with them?

Paco Pignatelli (05:50):
Yeah, well with the last part, when we started at the beginning we were working with many suppliers initially. For us it was a little bit of a challenge to go with so many for a given radio solution. I have to admit that initially look at the portfolio, it was looking good on paper, but we didn't have experience. So it was great to see, to piggyback on the effort from some other partners in the industry, you had a lot of work with Verizon, that is a company that we work very well with. So that was giving us the right confidence to start, but that was just the beginning. And then when we were actually getting on the project, the day by day has proven that it was the right decision to work with Wind River because we've been able to execute on time, we've been able to execute the right quality and even more. We have a very good story for the future. So we are going to be building the solution as we go. It was really the right decision.

Paul Miller (06:54):
Yes, and certainly quality and performance are a big part of our DNA as a company. We're in a lot of mission critical systems, aircraft, automobiles, telecommunications, infrastructure, and we were really excited to work with Vodafone. And you're right, we were able to springboard off a very large deployment at Verizon that we were able to use for years to harden the solution that we brought to Vodafone. And the work with Vodafone was actually very innovative. New timing solutions that were produced for the cellular network based on PTP architectures and a lot of novel ideas were brought to play to really build a cost efficient solution that optimized the hardware configuration in the field and drove us to this high performance that we achieved at Vodafone. So really, really successful journey

Charlotte Kan (07:35):
Paco, you have been leading the open ran development efforts at Vodafone for the past 10 years now. So based on your experience, what are the top three pieces of advice you would give to your counterparts at other CSPs? In other words, how do you go about it?

Paco Pignatelli (07:51):
That's a very good question. Well, I would say first you cannot wait. So if you are doing radio networks is now the time to start doing open run. So maybe last year you could still be waiting a little bit, but now it's really the time so you really need to be working on it. So that would be the first point. Second is you need to be ready to contribute as well, because this collaboration is very important. So we have that principle ourselves as a big mobile operator, we're going to be helping others to come in. So anybody listening that wants to learn more about our experience in open run or our experience with Wind River, please reach out. But you need to be ready to keep something right. So ultimately this will work if we have a collaboration. And then I would also say that it's important that you start considering the operational impact of open run in terms of how do you deploy your business as usual your processes. So it takes time to get all that, but there is significant change because most, a good part of the benefit comes through transformation of existing processes. And that's very important as well.

Paul Miller (09:14):
And I'd certainly add as well that it's really not just the selection of a technology platform, right? The technology's proven and we've demonstrated that, but in choosing partners to help build out a telecommunication service providers network, you really need the people as well, right? And people with knowledge and experience having deployed this type of technology. The ability to overcome obstacles that you'll encounter in network engineering in your environment, really, really important. And then as you mentioned, the operational aspect, bringing in high levels of automation and artificial intelligence, the ability to remove a lot of human effort and deploying a disaggregated system is a key part of hitting the low cost metrics.

Charlotte Kan (09:52):
And finally, some people believe that 2024 would be a tipping point for open ran deployment. Do you agree?

Paco Pignatelli (09:58):
Yeah, I think as we were saying before, we are ticking the box on performance that's already already done. I think we are also starting to see innovations on top of the foundation level for open run. For example, we have also recently also in field Royal performed some testing with a company called Go Here that is showing fantastic improvements in capacity. Spectral efficiency could go up to 50% potentially. We need to see how this is commercialized, but it's proving the way open ran works. So foundation is there, innovation is starting to be seen. We can get more out of open ran than before. And then yes, this year we have big tenders at and t recently announced and they were awarding a lot of space for open running their contract. We are running our tender in Vodafone and we are going to be deploying at scale and open run needs to be there. The 2024 is definitely the year. Yes, yes.

Charlotte Kan (10:59):
Paco, Paul, thank you.

Paul Miller (11:00):
Thank you very much.

Paco Pignatelli (11:01):
Thank you for having us.