Rakuten Claims Open RAN Performance Gain Is Imminent

Rakuten Mobile this week dismissed critics that blame its uneven network performance on its open radio access network (RAN) infrastructure. Rakuten Mobile this week dismissed critics that blame its uneven network performance on its open radio access network (RAN) infrastructure. The greenfield operator, which has deployed the world’s first cloud native and fully virtualized mobile network,  faced “tremendous” challenges in the planning, development, and assembling of its network infrastructure, but lags in performance are not the result of its technology choices or strategy, according to Tareq Amin, EVP at Rakuten and CTO at Rakuten Mobile. Spectrum allocation and availability is the most nagging issue impacting the performance of the operator’s nascent network today, he said.  However, that explanation only applies to spectrum Rakuten is using for 4G LTE. Japan’s regulators awarded Rakuten 20 megahertz of spectrum in the 1.7 GHz band that was previously reserved for the country’s military, and while it’s successfully cleared that spectrum in many large cities there are still large swaths of the country where Rakuten only has access to 5 megahertz of its total allotment, Amin explained. Most of that untapped spectrum will be available to Rakuten later this year, he added. Rakuten’s spectrum position for 5G is another matter. It has almost 100 megahertz of unencumbered spectrum for its 5G network and the operator is accelerating its 5G build plan by five years, claiming it will have 96% of the country covered by this summer with more than 27,000 base stations deployed. The operator’s latest rebuttal to open RAN naysayers, follow disappointing findings from Opensignal about its network’s performance and a resulting report from MoffettNathanson that noted “Rakuten’s network performance has deteriorated [since April 2020], despite aggressive network deployment, and slower than expected user growth, and thus lower-than-expected network load.” The carrier this week gathered dozens of U.S. journalists and analysts on a conference call to address those findings and argue that performance will improve considerably this year.  “In the early days when we launched 5G we could not even exceed above 800 Mb/s and the software continued to get better, continued to improve,” Amin said. Rakuten Mobile, he claimed, is now on pace to “easily” deliver speeds above 1 Gb/s. Getting to this point was not a fun or easy journey, he said, adding that stability, capacity, and scalability were all challenging to achieve on commodity architecture. But during the last three years, Rakuten substantially improved the software stack that now serves the underlying base code for its 4G LTE and 5G networks, according to Amin.  While open RAN has many detractors, there is a continued and growing push from network operators for disaggregated, cloud native network architecture. Many industry analysts are increasingly confident about the technology as well. “It is true there are some software challenges with open RAN and vRAN but there are many top engineers working on these issues across the industry and we are confident the technology will reach a point of maturity that it will become the defacto standard for RAN during this decade,” Chris Antlitz, principal analyst at Technology Business Research, wrote in response to questions after attending Rakuten Mobile’s call.  Indeed, Dell’Oro Group today reiterated its previous forecast that open RAN will account for more than 10% of the overall market by 2025. ABI Research expects capex on open RAN radios to surpass traditional RAN radios in 2027 or 2028.  “Rakuten has been a pioneer on this front and has shown the world that the technology works and can scale,” Antlitz added.  Ed Gubbins, principal analyst at GlobalData, picked up on that theme as well, highlighting the role Rakuten is playing to showcase open RAN and virtualized RAN (vRAN) for the entire industry. However, he noted that Rakuten’s model and approach will only apply to a few companies.  “To most operators, the relevance of what Rakuten is learning is limited by the fact that Rakuten is deploying a greenfield network with no legacy infrastructure,” he explained. The operator “has a very different reality and set of requirements than most operators would face in implementing these architectures.” As such, most operators are particularly keen to see how open RAN activities play out with traditional operators like Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, Vodafone, and others, Gubbins said.