Telefonica and NEC Corporation announced an agreement to conduct Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) pre-commercial trials in Spain, Germany, the UK and Brazil.
Telefonica is an early adopter of open networks and one of the major European operators that signed the Open RAN MoU in January this year for the deployment of Open RAN solutions aimed at building 5G mobile networks.

Telefonica has a target of reaching 50 percent radio network growth based on Open RAN by 2025, says Enrique Blanco, Chief Technology & Information Officer (CTIO) at Telefonica.

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.

The Open RAN solutions are comprised of an ecosystem of NEC’s own products as well as software and hardware products of trusted industry leading partners. NEC’s open 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) radio units (RU) with advanced beamforming that significantly helps to increase/optimize network capacity will be a part of the ecosystem.