Vodafone has chosen Ericsson as its sole radio access network (RAN) vendor across Ireland, the Netherlands, and Portugal, while tapping Nokia and Samsung for services across Europe and Africa.

The five-year Ericsson deal sees it become the exclusive RAN provider in the three regions, while becoming a major partner in Vodafone’s Germany, Romania, and Egypt markets. The Swedish giant will provide massive multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) radios and RAN Compute solutions in the deal, as well as 5G Advanced RAN software solutions.

Vodafone’s open, multi-vendor RAN management will be carried out by Ericsson’s Intelligent Automation Platform (EIAP), seeing the deployment of AI-driven automation to optimize energy use and enable autonomous networks with multi-vendor RAN management.

This automation will be made possible by AI-driven rApps, microservice-based applications operating in non-real time, which are tailored for use cases such as traffic steering, interference mitigation, and energy savings.

Vodafone Germany will be the first branch to see this EIAP deployment, scheduled for Q4 2025, followed by other markets covered in the arrangement.

Nokia in Europe and Africa

In addition to the Ericsson news, Vodafone is keeping Nokia as its strategic partner in Europe and Africa as part of Vodafone’s five-year RAN investment venture.

As part of the extended deal, Nokia will supply kit from its AirScale Radio Access Network (RAN) portfolio, including Massive MIMO radios of the sort recently deployed by SoftBank, plus baseband and remote radio head (RRH) solutions driven by Nokia’s ReefShark system-on-chip (SoC) platform.

The Nokia partnership will see the first roll-out of a 5G Dual-Band Massive MIMO Radio in Africa, alongside use of Nokia’s autonomous network management solution, MantaRay NM.

With Nokia’s ongoing presence, Vodafone has again kept the European giants of Nokia and Ericsson in its fold. The pan-European deals with both vendors follow last month’s VodafoneThree $2.7 billion mega-deal, with Ericsson and Nokia tapped by Vodafone’s British arm to expand and upgrade its 5G network infrastructure in the UK.

Unlike the VodafoneThree deal, no financial details were disclosed in the latest Vodafone deals with the two firms.

Samsung for Europe

Vodafone also selected Korean giant Samsung as its primary partner for large-scale Open RAN and virtualized radio networks (vRAN) deployments within Europe.

Tying in with Vodafone Germany’s open RAN deployment using Ericsson software, Germany is tipped to host one of Europe’s largest Open RAN deployments, with Samsung to kit out thousands of sites across the continent following the German deployment. The first site in Hannover is now in operation, with Wismar in the northeast planned to become Vodafone’s first fully Open RAN-equipped city by early 2026 next year.

Samsung’s vRAN offerings will also be used to introduce AI capabilities into Vodafone’s networks using Samsung CognitiV NOS, which has seen use by Orange France, Japan’s KDDI, and Telus in Canada.