In August of this year, around 16 months after initial launch, Rakuten Mobile counted 5 million subscribers on its facilities-based and MVNO 4G and 5G networks. Right now the carrier is working on coverage expansion, deploying millime ter wave 5G, and planning for the transition to standalone 5G. The ultimate vision is for 4,000 micro data centers, along with centralized data centers, supporting around 80,000 4G and 5G base stations.
Perhaps more significant than what it has done in its home market is the work Rakuten has done to productize and sell its approach to building a cloud-native network using Open RAN principles. In addition to development of the Rakuten Communications Platform, Rakuten Group recently created the Rakuten Symphony organization to drive global adoption of its telecom network infrastructure and services, including RCP. With operations across Japan, the Unit ed States, Singapore, India, Europe and the Middle East Africa region, Rakuten Symphony aims to bring together all of Rakuten’s telco prod ucts, services and solutions under a single global portfolio to offer 4G and 5G infrastructure and platform solutions to customers worldwide.
Rakuten has long promoted capex and opex savings associated with its approach to building a network rather than a more traditional build: a 40% capex reduction comes from lower deployment and hardware costs chalked up to virtualized network functions and pooling network resources, and a 30% opex reduction from less rent, less maintenance and more network automation. It’s worth noting that, in breaking out these reductions attributed to the RCP approach, Rakuten does project increased costs from data center capacity and data transmission which maps to an architecture involving distributed edge compute facilities.
U.S.-based vRAN software specialist Altiostar was a major vendor to Rakuten Mobile for its build in Japan, and the company is part of the tech stack included in Rakuten Communications Platform as sold by Symphony. In August, Rakuten Group announced it will acquire Altiostar based on a $1 billion valuation. Altiostar CEO Ashraf Dahod said the acquisition will help accelerate technology development and, in turn, time to innovation. “Open RAN architecture and virtualization are key to building software-centric networks that can scale and adapt to meet an explosion of devices and applications driving service velocity and profits.”
Altiostar’s Shabbir Bagasrawala, head of product go-to-market, said the company has evolved from a RAN software company to having a “portfolio we can present to customers, especially on the automation side. When we did Rakuten, we were focusing on automation. We were focusing on a lot of things that were innovative for the industry as a whole. With the acquisition, it allows us to offer this up to other customers. Previously we were thinking about deploying our RAN software and trying to retrofit some of that automation into an existing telco space. This is something we can give you and you can start using it immediately. You can get all these benefits. And we obviously get the scale of Rakuten.
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