Rakuten Symphony has chosen Juniper Networks’ RAN Intelligent controller (RIC) as the exclusive choice within its Symworld Platform for Open RAN. Juniper and Rakuten have worked together on the latter’s mobile network build-out in Japan, though not for the RIC – there, the MNO embedded Juniper’s virtual, cloud-native routing stack in its distributed unit (DU). Rakuten Mobile CEO Tareq Amin recently announced that the Symphony RIC would be offered for free, as long as customers paid for at least one application to run on top of the platform. It is likely that Juniper has agreed a revenue-sharing deal with Rakuten, though having its RIC effectively anointed as the only choice within the Symphony platform will also greatly increase the US…