Rakuten has certainly blazed a trail for deployment of cloud-native, open 5G networks, but its larger Japanese rival, NTT Docomo, is claiming the real Open RAN credits for itself. While Rakuten’s network is multivendor, much of it is heavily customized and hand-crafted, while Domoco head of RAN development, Sadayuki Abeta, claims to be building a full Open RAN-compliant network. “Our RAN is fully multivendor interoperable – that means even in the same geographic area we use different vendors’ equipment for the CU/DU (centralized unit/distributed unit) side and the RU (radio unit) side,” he said, speaking at Light Reading’s Open RAN Digital Symposium last week. He said Docomo has deployed more than 10,000 base stations in its Open RAN and is…