Rakuten Has Ambitious Plans to Become a Mobile Cloud Network Provider

Summary Bullets:

M. Rogers

• Rakuten Mobile is taking the cloud-native, open RAN-based mobile network it built in Japan and commercializing it as an open, end-to-end solution for other operators.
• While Rakuten’s mobile network solution is competing with similar recently launched products from leading technology companies like Microsoft and VMware, they all might have trouble convincing their target operator customers.

Rakuten Mobile, Japan’s fourth mobile operator, made headlines in the mobile industry in 2020 for launching its 4G mobile services using a cloud-native, fully virtualized mobile network, one that works on the principles of open RAN.  (Open RAN is a set of specifications for open and interoperable radio access networks allowing for disaggregation of portions of the radio access network, namely the radio unit [RU] as well as the distributed baseband and core baseband units, and for those subsections to be supplied by different vendors).  However, the company has taken lessons learned from the buildout of its own 4G and 5G cloud-native network and is now trying to productize this into a solution called Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP).  In addition to providing a solution for mobile operators, Rakuten is reportedly developing enterprise use cases for 5G edge computing for industry and IoT that can be also supported by the platform.