Qualcomm and Vodafone are working together to develop and test 5G Open RAN infrastructure.

The two companies have a longstanding relationship driving mobile communications innovations and this is seen as the next step in that collaboration.

By joining forces, they plan to develop, test and integrate 5G distributed units (DUs) and radio units (RUs) with massive MIMO capabilities, ultimately to deliver the commercial deployment of Open RAN.

This joint announcement builds on the companies’ previous commitment last year to develop technical blueprints that will help equipment suppliers build 5G networks of the future using Open RAN technology.

The 5G Open RAN infrastructure will be powered by the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN accelerator card and the QRU100 5G RAN platform. These are expected to offer breakthrough power consumption performance to reduce total cost of ownership and make networks environmentally sustainable. They will address demands of future networks with massive MIMO with 64T64R and 32T32R capabilities needed for high-capacity dense urban scenarios.

“We look forward to broadening our collaboration with Vodafone to deliver the next wave of digital transformation and proliferate Open RAN deployments globally with high-performance, energy efficient radio and distributed units,” said Dino Flore, vice president at Qualcomm. “By combining Qualcomm’s 5G leadership and Vodafone’s expertise in building large-scale networks, we can transform how modern networks are designed and next-generation services are delivered.”

The companies plan to unveil the results of their partnership at next year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“We congratulate Qualcomm on the recent sampling of the X100 5G RAN accelerator card and QRU100 5G RAN platform, and we look forward to working alongside Qualcomm to test and deliver these platforms,” said Santiago Tenorio, director for network architecture at Vodafone. “This significant milestone is an important step forward to deliver the commercial deployment of Open RAN in Europe, and bring innovative, cost-effective and power-efficient Open RAN.”