As the US and Chinese cloud providers explore ways to find their way into the 5G networks business, Rakuten of Japan has taken the most direct route of all – acquiring spectrum becoming an MNO. The company has attracted a lot of attention for its plans to deploy fully cloud-native 4G and 5G networks with help from a raft of vendors, but its business model is even more creative. The company already has an MVNO deal and is now becoming a fully-fledged MNO, but not because mobile broadband subscriptions will enhance its cloud and content revenues significantly. Instead, the aim is clearly to give it full control of the user experience for services which are growing rapidly on mobile systems,…