Vodafone will enhance its open network center in Malaga

The British group Vodafone is going to increase the size of the open mobile network development center ( Open RAN ) that it already maintains in its R&D center located in Malaga . The center was created with a staff of about 50 workers that will increase in the future. At the same time, the Malaga center will see its employment perimeter increase with the incorporation of the 374 employees who will move from Vodafone Spain to Vodafone Intelligent Solutions (VOIS) once the sale of the Spanish subsidiary of Vodafone to Zegona is closed.

The reason for this reduction is the transfer of these people from Vodafone Spain to Vodafone Group , that is, to the British parent company due to the sale of the Spanish subsidiary to the British financial group Zegona . Therefore, the transfer is conditional on the closing of the sale operation of the Spanish subsidiary and will only occur after the operation . These are employees who, on many occasions, had dual responsibilities, mainly in technical positions related to networks or administration, since they carried out tasks in the Spanish subsidiary but also absorbed global responsibilities in the British multinational. For this reason, on many occasions, their salaries were re-invoiced, that is, after paying their salaries, Vodafone Spain charged the group its cost. These 374 employees will maintain their current working conditions intact and unchanged and will move to a company called Vodafone Intelligent Solutions (VOIS) , which is the tool with which the Vodafone group will host these employees with global responsibilities. This VOIS company is the one that employs the workers of the Research and Development centers that the group has launched in the city of Malaga , and which currently number around six hundred people.

1,000 employees

That is to say, after the addition of these almost 400 new employees, the Vodafone group will maintain a workforce of around a thousand employees in Spain, once the main subsidiary has been sold to Zegona .

Regarding the Open RAN development group, Vodafone has indicated that this will be able to “replace many of the current time-consuming manual processes with zero-touch operations. This will make it faster and cheaper to introduce new software updates and install new “5G functions for customers. Likewise, it will continue to promote the development of more efficient chips in energy management from the Malaga Hub.”

Likewise, the group has explained that “the creation of the largest Open RAN laboratory in Malaga will accelerate the adoption of the technology and encourage industry participation, adapting solutions to specific use cases demanded by different sectors. This objective is “aligned with the guidelines of the European Union to promote a solid ecosystem of Open RAN technology suppliers, allowing to increase and consolidate the presence of European suppliers in the global market.”

Open RAN is positioned as the future of mobile networks by allowing the disaggregation of hardware and software in radio stations, allowing the software that controls the system to run on any general-purpose hardware, regardless of the supplier. Open RAN thus allows the generation of an open ecosystem of suppliers, promoting competition and flexibility, encouraging innovation and reducing the total cost of deployment and operation, compared to current access networks, where solutions are monolithic and proprietary.

The Vodafone Innovation Hub , which manages the commercial operations of the Vodafone Group and enterprise clients in 11 countries, is specialized in the development of technological solutions and innovative digital services based on unified communications, Internet of Things, virtual private networks, Open RAN (the standard of open and interoperable networks), Edge Computing, Connected Vehicle, Robotics, artificial intelligence, Cloud or Blockchain.

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