Connect(X) 2021 Coverage
Rakuten Mobile is a mobile operator in Japan that, in August of this year, transformed itself into a global mobile network solutions provider. Rakuten Mobile began its equipment deployment journey in Japan in April 2020, launching an end-to-end, cloud-native, Open RAN 4G network. Then, in September of last year, it introduced the 5G non standalone service. It is currently putting in the 5G standalone functions into the network and will be launching that service soon.
But Rakuten Mobile wanted to be more than just a carrier. It became an equipment provider with the purchase of Altiostar, a company that provides Virtual RAN and Open RAN technology, which is headquartered near Boston, MA, with offices in Japan, Italy, the U.K., Mexico and India. As a result, Rakuten Symphony was born, which is a new business organization to market a cloud-native open RAN infrastructure and services, including the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), to mobile network operators, enterprises and governments.
“Altiostar is a pioneer in ORAN and VRAN, and they’re really the only ones that have under their belt, the actual deployment of a network. We are focusing our energies and resources into providing that solution to others,” Azita Arvani, General Manager, Rakuten Mobile Americas, said during her keynote at Connect(X) this week in Orlando.
A contract to put that technology into action has already been signed. In August, 1&1 AG and Rakuten Group, Inc. entered into a long-term partnership to build the fourth mobile network in Germany, which will be Europe’s first fully virtualized mobile network based on ORAN technology. “We will be the general contractor and we’ll be doing the build, the design, the operations, maintenance and upgrade of that network,” Arvani said.
Rakuten is single minded about trying to break the proprietary OEMs’ grip on 5G technology. The company is active in the ORAN Alliance and Arvani evangelized about the advantages of the new technology.
“The more you can make the RAN efficient, the more savings you get. So in the traditional RAN, you have this monolithic stack with proprietary interfaces between the layers locked in from one vendor,” she said. “What we are doing in our 5G VRAN is that we have broken these layers, and we have standardized interfaces in between the layers with interoperable interfaces.”
With open, virtualized architecture, Rakuten’s cell sites have been simplified compared with traditional cell sites. A pole will have only the radio units and antennas and connections to power and fiber. “As you can imagine, this reduces the costs dramatically, if you don’t have all the cabinets and hardware at the base of the pole,” she said. “The baseband is turned into software running commercial hardware in the cloud, which reduces the cost by about 40 percent.” With less equipment, it will be easier to find sites that are approved by the city and then the equipment will be easier and faster to install, she added.
Rakuten Symphony’s architecture enables the promise of the ORAN, allowing many different radio units and radio vendors to be introduced into a network based on the use case requirements and which are the best of breed, according to Arvani.
Although people accept the efficiency the cloud brings to the RAN, some question whether it will provide the needed performance, she said. But a number of third party independent observers, such as OpenSignal, have given it favorable performance ratings in Japan.
“OpenSignal measured our 4G performance in October of last year, and we were number one in Japan with respect to upload speeds,” Arvani said. “Now, six months later, in April of this year, they came back and not only we had the upload speed experience still as number one, even with many more subscribers on the network, but we also had the best voice app experience.”
OpenSignal’s September tests on the network ranked Rakuten Mobile number one in Japan for both 5G download and 5G upload speeds.
By J. Sharpe Smith Inside Towers Technology Editor
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