Vodafone's deployment of Europe's first 5G standalone core

Vodafone's motivation to become the first service provider in Germany, and in Europe, to commercially offer 5G Standalone based services was highly driven by their desire of using this new technology to address the industry challenges and needs, such as: The core network in 5G non-standalone solutions is based on existing LTE infrastructure, meaning customers are not able to fully exploit advanced 5G capabilities such as network slicing and ultra-low latency. Vodafone wanted their customers to, for example, be able to experience applications such as lag-free online gaming experiences and virtual reality, and for enterprises, industrial robot applications, or remotely operated drone fleets, which is only possible with 5G Standalone. Better support and accelerate Industry 4.0 realization across Germany Vodafone is considered a key contributor to the development of Germany's digital infrastructure whose customers rely on them to deliver the best in connectivity. The German market has a very high percentage of small and medium enterprises that are world market leaders, and for those industries, it is super important to be competitive now in the journey towards digitalization and industry 4.0. Vodafone wanted to be ready to support them.