The Mobile World Congress 2021 closing today in Los Angeles, covered a wide range of topics and issues with Industry group sponsor GSMA putting a spotlight on the resilience demonstrated by the mobile sector during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. GSMA director general Mats Granryd called for celebration of “the resilience and progress the industry has made despite a time of extraordinary challenges, as the sector focuses efforts to advance connectivity.”
Granryd highlighted progress made towards digital transformation through accelerated 5G uptake in North America. The industry group predicted the next-generation technology will reach nearly 270 million mobile connections in North America by the end of 2025, representing almost two-thirds of the region’s total. He predicted that operators in the region will pour $300 billion into their networks between 2020 and 2025, 98 percent of which will go to 5G.
In a keynote address, Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin said his company could follow the Japanese model of software-based infrastructure and bring it to a global market, citing its new product Symphony that was recently-launched, introducing a distributed RAN and transport set-up. Amin said his company’s four-year journey has been productive, concluding with becoming Japan’s fourth major player in offering 5G services over a cloud-based open RAN network architecture. When Rakuten Symphony was launched in early August, it was designed to provide cloud-native open RAN infrastructure replicating its efforts in Japan.
Amin, also serving as the Rakuten Symphony CEO said, “We have a great opportunity to disrupt this industry, we have a great opportunity to really connect everything and bring better value to overall society and Rakuten Symphony is the platform idea for all the software technology stack that we have built into Japan. We wanted to take four years of lessons and package them into solutions that deliver immediate benefits to our customers and the telecoms industry.”
During the keynote, Amin announced that, in partnership with Intel and Juniper Networks, they were introducing a carrier-grade open RAN product designed for mobile operators called Symware. The product is engineered to modernize cell sites using cloud-native architecture. In a press statement, Rakuten Symphony explained the system would provide operators with the flexibility to densify networks, accommodate various topologies and offer new features while reducing the required hardware at each site.
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