In the wake of Rakuten Mobile turning on the first sections of its live 4G network in Japan, several of its 20-strong supply chain have announced products and partnerships based on their contributions to its ground-breaking cloud-native platform. Altiostar is a common denominator in many of these, since it supplied the virtualized network functions (VNFs) for the RAN, a particularly challenging element, and one which will be attractive to hardware makers without their own commercially robust VNFs for this domain. Two of its recently announced development and marketing alliances are with Airspan and Cisco, both Rakuten vendors, and it has now extended the Cisco deal further to include WWT, an integrator and a reseller of communications solutions. The three companies…