Rakuten Mobile continues to tighten its alliances with vendors to try to accelerate “global expansion” of its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), which aims to provide pre-integrated, mix-and-match hardware and software to enable operators to deploy Open Ran networks relatively cheaply and easily.
At least, more cheaply and easily than Rakuten itself, which is widely thought to have underestimated the cost and complexity of integrating and optimizing a cloud-native 4G/5G network from scratch. It had hundreds of engineers working on the project, but hopes to offset the costs (and the low levels of mobile revenues it has generated so far) by turning RCP into a professional services business.
It has signed memorandums of understanding with two Japanese vendors to support this effort. One is its own cornerstone supplier, NEC, which has co-developed 5G radio units and core for Rakuten and will put versions of those developments into RCP as well as a global NEC portfolio. The other is Fujitsu, which is one of Dish’s Open RAN radio unit suppliers though not currently part of the Rakuten network.
Under the MoU, Rakuten Mobile and NEC will develop Open RAN-compliant 4G and 5G radios for markets abroad, and offer engineering services to help operators, especially those without significant inhouse technical resources, to deploy the new architectures. In the past, these operators would often have relied almost entirely on the engineering services of their primary vendor, such as Ericsson or Nokia, but the Open RAN community want to ensure that it is practical for such operators to choose alternative suppliers too.
Fujitsu will also develop new Open RAN 4G and 5G radio units that Rakuten will integrate into RCP. Previously, Fujitsu’s only role in RCP was to provide quality assurance, including evaluation tests for interoperability and hardware quality verification in a multivendor environment.
“With Japanese quality and a highly competitive cost structure as major differentiators, our joint efforts with Fujitsu are on track to bring significant incremental value to our customers and partners around the world,” said Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin, claiming there are now 15 paying customers (unnamed) for RCP. Those initial revenues are coming from OSS and orchestration layers.