The departure of Tareq Amin – the visionary CTO behind Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native network and the CEO of the firm’s Symphony vendor arm – highlights the commercial failure of Japan’s new entrant MNO (so far at least) as well as the challenges facing the Open RAN market that Symphony was set up to commercialize. Amin’s departure, whatever the reasons, will be a blow to the wider Open RAN community, in which he was such a high-profile and visionary cheerleader. In reality though, leading Open RAN deployers are generally not adopting the Rakuten blueprint. Even Dish has very different architecture and vendor choices, including the decision to put its core and some RAN functions in the AWS cloud. And operators such…