The project will now move into its final deployment phase, bringing the total number of Open RAN small cell sites to 34 in the city centre
Three UK has successfully completed the first stage of a landmark trial – the UK’s first deployment of Open RAN in a dense urban environment. The trial is part of the SCONDA project, which is backed by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and builds on earlier trials which had only taken place in rural locations.
The SCONDA project is a partnership with Three UK, Mavenir, AWTG, Freshwave, PI Works, the 5G Scotland Centre and Accenture, with the support of Glasgow City Council and funding from the UK government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
Three reckons that by installing compact Open RAN small cells on street furniture, the trial delivered impressive results: both 4G and 5G speeds doubled at peak times, with 5G speeds reaching up to 520Mbps – decent results for an urban environment. The carrier said the trial demonstrates the benefit of deploying Open RAN small cells alongside existing macro networks to solve blackspot issues. The capacity boost also cascaded into further performance and user experience improvements in surrounding sites.
Following the successful trial of 18 live sites in Glasgow City Centre, the project will now move into its final deployment phase, bringing the total number of Open RAN small cell sites to 34.
For the rollout, Mavenir is delivering a full 4G and 5G O-RAN solution, including its OpenBeam small cell radios running on Red Hat OpenShift, powered by Kubernetes. The Mavenir 4G and 5G small cell radios offload macro traffic and enable automation of network performance within a challenging multi-vendor, multi-technology radio environment. Three UK is leveraging Red Hat OpenShift to build and deliver the Open vRAN network, integrated into the existing 4G core of Three UK, and operating alongside the operator’s traditional RAN.
“Urban deployments bring a different level of technical and operational challenge compared to rural environments,” said Three UK chief network officer Iain Milligan. “We’ve had to navigate integration with legacy systems, security layers, and evolving software – all while delivering measurable improvements for customers. The trial results are encouraging and provide a strong foundation for further scaling and optimisation of Open RAN in cities.”
He added: “Mavenir and Red Hat have been exceptional partners on this groundbreaking project…We have pushed the boundaries and proven that the Open RAN approach is a hugely valuable addition to network design and deployment.”
Three UK’s approach was to opt for Red Hat’s OpenShift platform to manage the complexity of integrating new Open RAN small cells with existing macro infrastructure – a technical challenge that has previously limited urban small cell deployments. The automated management capabilities appear to have been critical in scaling from 18 to 34 sites, suggesting that manual network operations simply don’t scale as well for dense urban rollouts.
Secure architecture
Perhaps most significantly for operators is that, the security architecture had to accommodate the reality of mixing vendor equipment, with containerised isolation and network segmentation allowing Three UK to maintain carrier-grade security while introducing Mavenir’s radios alongside their traditional RAN vendors. This hybrid approach, rather than a wholesale RAN replacement, may end up being a more practical path for operators looking to deploy Open RAN without the operational disruption of ripping out existing infrastructure.
“This network densification project proves that the Open RAN layer built by Mavenir can efficiently and effectively meet the needs of Three UK and its customers in one of the busiest cities in the UK,” said Mavenir SVP cloud and AI Brandon Larson. “Our solution has delivered a 2x improvement in 5G speeds, a measurable uplift in capacity, and handover of customer traffic has been outstanding. This powerfully demonstrates that Open RAN can be fully integrated alongside traditional vendors – a breakthrough that will get the attention of radio network design teams around the world for the cost savings and flexibility it offers.”
“Red Hat and Mavenir share a commitment to delivering optimised Open RAN solutions for service providers to achieve improved network performance and unlock the next generation of 5G use cases,” added Red Hat VP global telco ecosystem Honoré LaBourdette.
Mavenir said its Open RAN solution on Red Hat OpenShift provides mobile networks with core platform security controls, including admission controllers, container isolation via Security Context Constraints (SCCs), runtime protection using kernel-level security modules (seccomp, SELinux), role-based access controls (RBAC) and network segmentation through CNI/OVN.
