LIVE FROM MWL UNWRAPPED: Vodafone Group’s head of open RAN Francisco Martin Pignatelli (pictured) stated the operator was on the cusp of naming suppliers for its ambitious radio network tender across its entire Africa and Europe operations.

The operator issued a request for proposal in April covering all of its 170,000 radio network sites in those areas at the time (the exact number has since fallen with Vodafone’s divestment of assets in key European markets including Italy and Spain). That effort includes strategic partner e&, the UAE-based operator that is a large shareholder in Vodafone.

“We are in the last phases. It’s difficult to say now exactly if it’s going to be days or weeks, but certainly pretty soon we will know the outcome,” Pignatelli said.

He explained Vodafone Group runs a process every five or six years “to look at the modernisation of the network”.

“There are cycles for modernisation and upgrades, and this is one of them,” he said.

Former Vodafone network architecture director Yago Tenorio stated at an industry event in 2023 the company planned to employ open RAN across 30 per cent of its European sites by 2030.

Pignatelli declined to comment on whether the 30 per cent goal is still in play, but stated “we can confidently say that open RAN is going to be the technology of the future when it comes to radio”.

He noted open RAN is now broadly supported by virtually all the “big players” and that the initial assumptions “about cost benefits influencing the ecosystem and also innovation are materialising.”

“The good thing is that’s the destination. How we get there will be determined by obviously a number of factors, but that’s the future and future is here today.”

Watch a replay of the full keynote interview here.