Rakuten has pledged to make open RAN architectures easily accessible and deployable, even by operators without significant engineering teams and budgets, by packaging up pre-integrated combinations of hardware and software. It launched its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) in late 2019 with this aim in mind, building on its own network architecture, intellectual property and deployment experience. This month, it has added its latest vendor partner, Airspan, to the platform – which also works on joint sales and go-to-market strategies. The RCP concept has gained strong support from Telefónica – though that alliance, in itself, gave rise to fears that the dreams of a fully open RAN market might be compromised in the interests of convenience. Rakuten set out a fine…