Vodafone UK starts ‘risky’ shift to 5G standalone

Vodafone’s Andrea Dona has unflattering words for some of the IT products that could sit inside his high-performance 5G network. “There are OSS limitations,” said the chief network officer of the UK service provider, referring to operational support systems from unnamed vendors. “If there is full automation on the 5G element, and the OSS is archaic, you have a Ferrari with a tractor driver.”

There is perhaps more danger that Vodafone ends up with an expensive sports car it cannot sell. It has recently begun a costly and potentially troublesome upgrade to 5G standalone. Non-standalone, the version of the mobile technology already in use, brought more advanced radio systems but continued to rely on the old 4G core. Standalone introduces a new one, cutting the 4G towrope once and for all. Promising an array of whizzy features, it has been dubbed “real 5G” by some marketers. Yet today, there is no mass-market application that demands standalone availability.

Unsurprisingly, then, most telcos show few signs of a standalone rush. But Dona’s overriding message is that Vodafone cannot simply afford to sit back and do nothing. “We don’t know what we don’t know,” he told reporters and analysts at a press conference in London this week. “We might be surprised by something that’s cooking and need to be ready. To stimulate that, I need a 5G core that I can showcase.”

But rolling out a commercial standalone network is not for the faint-hearted, as Vodafone is discovering. One of the main challenges involves spectrum. Operators have tended to use lower bands with good signal propagation to spread 4G across wide areas, adding dollops of highband 5G in busier places. With insufficient sites, a standalone connection might fail. “You come off, go onto 4G for coverage, and then go back up, which is not a great experience,” said Dona. “That is the risk.”

A further complication is that some of Vodafone’s 4G sites in London are now at their capacity limits. And Dona freely admits that Vodafone has only about a third as many 5G sites there as some rivals have built. To mitigate the standalone risk, it has been deploying 5G in low bands as well as higher frequency ranges, thereby filling in the coverage gaps. If the process is not managed carefully, performance suffers, said Dona.

Core blimey

Outside the radio access network (RAN), he is also facing the transition to an entirely new core developed by an entirely different supplier. Vodafone’s old 4G core comes from Cisco and will eventually be scrapped, although Dona is not sharing details of the timescale. Replacing it is a funkier system built by Ericsson, the Swedish company that is also Vodafone UK’s biggest RAN supplier. Traffic already runs on this Ericsson core.

Once every customer has been moved across, Vodafone can ditch Cisco and remove what Dona calls “regrettable spend.” But this process, like the RAN overhaul, involves “lots of heavy lifting,” he said. For one thing, the old core is installed in only a few places (again, Dona is not sharing details). With the new one, the number of core sites looks set to go up.

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.