Dish announces its first deal with Rakuten Symphony, for OSS Dish Network promises to be the next flagship greenfield deployer of Open RAN, after Rakuten. Although it has often referenced Rakuten’s ground-breaking (though heavily customized) deployment in Japan, it has not directly said it would use the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), which pre-integrates many of the elements used in Japan, and which Rakuten will commercialize through its new vendor and integrator arm, Symphony. Indeed, the US operator has generally chosen different suppliers, as a result of a long series of RFPs, from those of Rakuten (Fujitsu, rather than NEC, was its first radio partner, for instance, and it is famously going to run some of its RAN functions in AWS’s…