There is no doubt that Rakuten Mobile’s greenfield roll-out in Japan has been the most-watched network deployment in the world over the past year. The new MNO set out its plans with a great fanfare at Mobile World Congress 2019 and proceeded to select more than 20 vendors to help it roll out an end-to-end, open, cloud-native 4G network (soon to include 5G). A year later, and with inevitable delays and setbacks along the way, the first commercial services were announced and the first phase of the build-out completed. In the spirit of the open networks it espouses, Rakuten has not been secretive about its suppliers, and all of them have been able to use their involvement to raise their…