Rakuten Mobile will finally launch its first commercial 4G services on April 8, with an unlimited data plan priced at around $28 a month (though only within the company’s somewhat limited footprint – when roaming, users are capped at 2GB a month).
The company has its eyes on markets beyond its own direct mobile base however. Like a select group of operators before it, such as SK Telecom of South Korea, it believes it can take its experience of integrating and deploying a radical new architecture to the wider MNO community, in a mixture of contributions to open platforms, and revenue-generating services.
CTO Tareq Amin thinks Rakuten has unique experience which is of high interest to others. It has rolled out the world’s first end-to-end cloud-native mobile network based on open interfaces, and it has acted as its own systems integrator, so the lessons it can share have been learned directly, rather than by a vendor or prime contractor. There were over 20 suppliers involved in the roll-out, each providing various types of equipment, support and services, but Amin says Rakuten itself pulled all that together.
Cisco, TechMahindra and Nokia were some of the suppliers which had integration and managed services elements to their roles, but on an end-to-end basis, the operator itself made the final decisions and was “in control of our own destiny”, as Amin said at the network launch event recently. He added: “I knew if we didn’t act as the systems integrator we would never accomplish such a thing. We had all these vendors, who are competitors, and we had to convince them to collaborate and work together, do the integration in our labs.”
The operator has an inhouse team of 130 engineers, and Amin says these can install a new radio/antenna in about eight minutes, compared with three days for a traditional macrosite. The design, Amin claimed, reduces capex by about 40% compared to a conventional network of the same scale, and opex by about 30%.
“There’s no longer a debate, does this work or not, we’ve achieved a capacity level that is really unprecedented on what you could do in maximizing throughput per sector, capacity per sector,” he said.
This is the kind of knowledge that Rakuten now says it can export to the world. It has indicated that it could either license some of its systems to other operators or contribute them to open industry platforms like ORAN Alliance. Or it could leverage the repeatability of a common cloud architecture to roll out relatively easily itself, in other markets.
“We intend to export what we have built outside of Japan as well,” said CEO Hiroshi Mikitani recently. “Rakuten Mobile is not just about Japanese mobile network operator service, but we want to become – together with Qualcomm and others – a global MNO platform service.”
This would be in line with the cloud economics of the parent company, which involve replicating services, including video content and financial services, and now mobile applications, in many countries, taking advantages of the economies of scale of a common cloud platform. Rakuten’s web services, including online banking, mobile payments and messaging, now have 1.4bn users round the world.
The first indication of this international ambition is a partnership between Rakuten and Singapore’s newest mobile entrant, TPG, to test open RAN systems. This could see TPG taking advantage of the experience Rakuten has gained from its own challenging roll-out, and the work it has done to harden open interfaces into robust commercial units.
Rakuten said that other operators can benefit from flexibility and faster innovation if they use open, programmable RAN software running on disaggregated architectures and general purpose processors.
“The strategic partnership is a validation of Rakuten Mobile’s strategy and we are happy to share our innovative end-to-end virtualization solutions built on our vision of an open and multivendor mobile network ecosystem,” said Amin. “Singapore’s high fiber density makes it uniquely suited for rapid open RAN adoption and successful implementation.”
TPG, a subsidiary of Australia’s TPG Telecom Group, operates a 4G network in Singapore, and to date has signed up 300,000 customers for its introductory trial. Its acting CEO, Richard Tan, said: “Such efforts can help to accelerate the adoption of next generation 5G mobile networks with software-defined technology based on open interfaces and community-developed standards running on open hardware.”
And TPG may be learning some lessons from Rakuten on the disruptive pricing front too. Singapore’s new entrant announced its first plan last week, undercutting the existing three MNOs by some distance. It will need to adopt clever pricing to gain share in a very saturated market (a 3G/4G penetration rate of 160% according to regulator IMDA) while safeguarding its own profitability.
For now, TPG has been running a free trial for several months and has launched a 4G voice application and free roaming in certain markets. Now it has announced a single, SIM-only offer, that gives customers 50GB of data for S$10 (US$7). It has promised an equally simple prepaid plan at a later date.
Customers can set a limit for excess data, which is billed at S$1 per GB, “which is just a fraction of the typical $10 per extra GB charged by the industry,” TPG said.
By comparison, StarHub’s cheapest SIM-only plan is S$25 for 15GB of data; M1 charges the same for 30GB; and Singtel offers 3GB of data for S$20.