Rakuten Mobile Tech Leader’s Open RAN Wish List

Tareq Amin is bold in both his vision for the future of mobile networking and the claims he makes about Rakuten Mobile’s ability to flip the industry upside down.  Tareq Amin is bold in both his vision for the future of mobile networking and the claims he makes about Rakuten Mobile’s ability to flip the industry upside down.  The greenfield network, funded by the e-commerce giant of the same name, has a true open radio access network (RAN) believer leading the charge. While many goals have been accomplished, the more grandiose vision and potential success of Rakuten Mobile, and open RAN by extension, is still rooted in theoretical terms. “For open RAN to flourish, I think we must see a lot more companies coming and doing what Rakuten is doing, enabling suppliers, whether it is medium or startups, to come into realization,” Amin, the operator’s CTO, said last week during a call with analysts and journalists. “We need more of this ecosystem to grow, and I do believe the future in open RAN is very positive. I think this is where we need to head as technology and as telecom companies in general,” he said. Amin said he is betting, perhaps even counting, on leading chipmakers, including Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and possibly Broadcom, to develop more powerful and less constrained silicon.  Disaggregated radio architecture is a key pillar of open RAN, and most of the debate centers around radios because traditional RAN is such a closed and effective monopoly controlled by three global vendors. It’s a controlling mechanism that operators are determined to break, but it’s just one part of the equation. To make disaggregated, automated, and cloud-native connectivity a reality, the industry has to look at the totality of everything required to run a network, Amin explained. This involves a nuanced understanding of the elegance of software in mobile network architecture and a realization that radios are not a mysterious component that cannot be unlocked, he added.  Monica Paolini, founder and principal analyst at Senza Fili, said the success of open RAN is going to be equally dependent on vendors and operators. “You can have excellent equipment and an operator may deploy it ineffectively. An operator may have a great approach to open RAN, and this is the case with Rakuten to a large extent, but may not choose the best equipment for its network, or may not integrate the different vendors effectively,” she explained. “We did not decide to build this network on this open architecture just because it felt right,” Amin said. Rakuten Mobile’s business model is driven by a belief that connectivity will become commoditized, and greater value can be achieved by companies that deliver services or applications on top of that connectivity layer, he explained. This new business model that Rakuten is hoisting upon the telecom industry is the larger and more important takeaway, according to Chris Antlitz, principal analyst at Technology Business Research. The operator, and others developing upon this model, “has the potential to fundamentally disrupt the status quo of telcos selling network access to subscribers,” he said.  Amin describes Rakuten Mobile’s network as “an IT commoditized deployment of infrastructure,” and that includes data centers, cell site deployment and management, subscriber management and support, fiber access and elasticity based on real-time consumption requirements, and IP transport. Moreover, a photonic reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) that provides the underlying optics for Rakuten Mobile’s network is “the first of its kind, to my knowledge, worldwide,” he said.  Automation, of course, plays a critical role in that framework and ultimate vision. Rakuten Mobile has less than 200 people working in operations, according to Amin. And collectively, this is what gives him the confidence to boast that the total cost of ownership savings on 5G network operations will be greater than 50%, he said.  The operator’s disaggregated millimeter-wave (mmWave) base stations are cheaper than outdoor Wi-Fi access points and can be deployed in four minutes, he claimed. “When you think about making licensed telecom infrastructure between 70% to 80% cheaper, I think that’s a tremendous opportunity.” Amin also welcomes the growing interest and investment hyperscalers are making in telecom infrastructure as it broadens the ecosystem and validates “what we’re doing has a solid foundation and a solid business model,” he said.  Rakuten Mobile’s network engineers and software developers have gained an “unprecedented wealth of knowledge” required to harden its cloud-native software stack, understand how to deploy and run radios, build an operations and business support system (OSS/BSS), and an orchestrator that currently manages more than 800 virtual network functions (VNFs) in the network core, according to Amin. Other webscale companies like Microsoft and Amazon can surely acquire and develop technology stacks that continue down this path, but it’s not a trivial or simple endeavor, he added. “I have no doubt that they could provide extremely good and amazing cloud platforms,” but it’s unclear how determined or capable hyperscalers are to deliver all of the necessary automation, including OSS, BSS, and orchestration into the underlying cloud infrastructure, Amin said.  Rakuten, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will all “leverage these new technologies and network architectures to increase the economic value of their digital ecosystems,” Antlitz said. “According to our research, this trend of tightly integrating the webscalers’ digital ecosystem with a next-generation network could unlock trillions of dollars in new economic value globally.”