Vodafone’s Spring 6 Network Strategy Signals a Hard Reset for Open RAN Aspirations

Vodafone has completed the vendor selection process for Spring 6, a strategic program across Europe and Africa. The announcements were as follows:

• Ericsson will be the only core network provider and primary Radio Access Network (RAN) vendor in the United Kingdom, providing service to around 10,000 sites and covering all four capitals. Ericsson will also be the only RAN vendor in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Portugal, and will continue to lead orchestration and automation in many markets.
• Nokia has received a significant role in the vendor selections, particularly in the United Kingdom, where it has won the project to manage around 7,000 sites. This includes wielding its influence to replace Huawei at 3,700 sites, filling some gaps left by Samsung, and taking back parts of its earlier footprint.
• Samsung was expected to play an even larger role after Huawei’s departure, but its rollout in the United Kingdom has stalled at around 70 sites, and it has made a pivot to projects deploying Vodafone's Open RAN in Europe—delivering virtualized RAN (vRAN) in these projects and working closely with Nokia and Ericsson.
• Fujitsu has been added to Vodafone’s Open RAN ecosystem with its O-RAN compliant 1FINITY radios. While this introduces modularity, orchestration will be managed by Ericsson and Nokia.

Despite Huawei's exit creating room for new players, Vodafone's selections under Spring 6 have mostly relied on established vendors, and in some markets, Huawei is still operating. Open RAN is important symbolically, but it is being rolled out in a tightly orchestrated model that values operation continuity and vendor control over significant architectural change.

Vodafone's vendor strategy across Europe illustrates the widening gap between the initial vision of Open RAN and the reality on the ground. Open RAN launched as an opportunity for vendor diversity and innovation disaggregation, but it is being implemented more as an extension of existing vendor ecosystems than as a disruptor. Vodafone’s dependency on Ericsson and Nokia again as suppliers of both RAN and orchestration indicates that openness is being layered onto incumbent platforms, rather than being built as a standalone platform. Even though orchestration platforms, such as Nokia’s MantaRay and, to a disputed extent, the Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform (EIAP), can be multi-vendor platforms, they remain very much tied to vendor ecosystems, limiting modularity and substitution of existing vendors that Open RAN intends to support.

Instead of indicating a lack of success for multi-vendor Open RAN, Vodafone's strategy demonstrates an intelligent commercial approach. The operator is taking advantage of the current hardware refresh cycle, driven by both regulatory restrictions and vendor exits, to rebalance its vendor portfolio by introducing new components while minimizing disruption to integration. For example, Fujitsu’s O-RAN compliant radios are being introduced into architectures still heavily reliant on Ericsson and Nokia; this is not unique to Vodafone. Operators are using Open RAN frameworks to introduce new components and secure additional control over their networks, but not to diversify them. The most significant changes have been in taking advantage of tools universally included in the definition of Open RAN where the exclusive emphasis is on incorporating open interfaces, like R1, for example, to allow new internal development of rApps and maximize RAN performance through Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) and RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) based platforms. In this way, Open RAN is working as a vehicle for strategic control and lifecycle management, even though it might not be used as a mechanism for overall architectural change.

Vodafone's experience illustrates something of a broader recalibration across the telecoms industry. Open RAN is not being abandoned, but reframed to match the operational and commercial realities of national-scale networks. Openness is being reframed, not as a path to full modularity, but rather as a way to build internal capability, improve flexibility, and ultimately improve leverage over vendors in tightly managed ecosystems. The recent Zinkworks deal underscores this approach, as Vodafone plans to leverage the Open RAN compliance of its radios to support greater integration and control of its network.

Vodafone's vendor strategy reflects a wider industry trend for Open RAN away from experimental architectures and toward delivery of integrated platforms that have proven themselves. This does not automatically close the door on Open RAN aspirations; instead, it highlights operational and commercial realties that remain with deploying disaggregated systems on a national scale.

Samsung's decrease in U.K. market share presents both a reputational risk and an opportunity. Although Vodafone has chosen not to include Samsung in the U.K. 5G Standalone (SA) rollout because it prioritized vendors that could provide integrated delivery and mature orchestration solutions, this is not because Samsung is technically unable to deliver these services. In fact, it has operated strongly in the United States by providing its vRAN stack with third-party radios and orchestration platforms at scale. However, being included in Vodafone’s European Open RAN rollout is certainly a significant victory, and an opportunity for Samsung to reposition itself in terms of the operator’s macro network strategy. To fully take advantage of this opportunity, Samsung needs to leverage its U.S. experience by working with Vodafone’s regional teams to develop deployment blueprints customized for the local context, particularly in mixed-spectrum markets with legacy Long Term Evolution (LTE) overlays. By advancing beyond generic O-RAN compliance, Samsung must also showcase that it can achieve real-world integration, and operationalize it, to expand its footprint in Europe.

Most operators are adopting Open RAN selectively, often in rural or greenfield environments, as they balance the promise of openness with the performance and integration demands of mature national-scale networks. The focus is now turning away from complete disruption to operational stability, integration maturity, and building internal capability (especially related to SMO, RIC, and rApp development). This indicates that even as Open RAN continued to expand, it will do so in managed environments, usually layered on top of incumbent vendor infrastructure. The next few years will be less about abandoning legacy models and more about selectively embedding openness into them.

Vodafone's approach of adopting vRAN as it advances toward Open RAN stands as a possible template for other European operators to follow. Specifically, operators such as Orange, Telefónica, and Deutsche Telekom are more likely to focus on Open RAN first, and then address virtualization and cloud initiatives only where the technical and commercial proposition makes sense. This movement in the region is not driven by disaggregation for its own sake, but is motivated by operators’ desires to reinforce control of the network, build internal expertise, and enhance operational flexibility. Open RAN also gives operators more influence over vendors in ecosystems that have been historically tightly controlled. Overall, Vodafone’s commercial and operational rationale suggest that other European operators will likely adopt a similar approach, albeit at their own pace and scale that will be dependent on their own network maturity and market circumstances.