If NEC succeeds in expanding its RAN and core capabilities to operators outside Japan this time around, it will be partly thanks to the very high profile support of Japan’s newest MNO, Rakuten Mobile.
Rakuten’s 4G/5G network may not be quite as pure in its cloud-native, end-to-end simplicity as claimed, but it is ground-breaking in many ways, not least the number of suppliers it brings together (coming up for 30 across all the domains). And it has certainly captured huge amounts of attention, and served as an early case study of how networks could be deployed, and supply chains managed, in a new way.
All that has thrown a spotlight on the vendors involved, particularly NEC. For 4G, Rakuten stuck with traditional heavyweights for the radio/antennas (Nokia) and the core (Nokia and Cisco), though the software elements of the RAN came from a start-up, Altiostar.
For 5G, however, the MNO has selected NEC, for the 3.8 GHz radios and cloud-native core (the 28 GHz mmWave radios will be from Airspan). It couched the choice in somewhat ‘Japan-first’ terms when it made the original announcement in March, with CTO Tareq Amin saying: “The partnership we are doing today with NEC for a product for 5G technology is something we should all be very proud about. It is built, manufactured and engineered in Japan at a significant cost reduction to what you see with global partners. This is our massive MIMO antenna, this is our 5G antenna, this is our future built and manufactured in Japan.”
In fact, he was following in a common Japanese MNO tradition of working closely with key, often local, suppliers to co-develop highly customized solutions. The first fruits were seen in the 5G Massive MIMO radio, which supports the RAN network functions provided, for 4G and 5G, by Altiostar (in which Rakuten is an investor). Now NEC and Rakuten say they have also co-developed the core, and will aim to sell it to other operators as one of the first elements of the recently announced Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP).
Whether or not RCP itself gains acceptance among large operators, this is a significant credibility boost for NEC as a provider of 5G RAN and core products, as well as its most established international businesses in backhaul, fronthaul and BSS/OSS. It has not broken through in the RAN before, outside its home country, but it may have a better chance this time.
It can argue that, in the cloud-native core and RAN, the platform is new and strange to the big three vendors too, and their usual advantages are diminished. If operators want something fully open and cloud-based, they may look favorably on a supplier with significant resources and longevity – 121-year-old NEC is certainly not a start-up or fly-by-night – but without the technological and cultural legacies of the leaders.
The co-developed Rakuten product is a containerized 5G Standalone platform which Amin said would provide “an open, secure and highly scalable 4G and 5G cloud-native converged core, that will also become a key feature of the highly competitive services we will offer to global customers through the Rakuten Communications Platform”.
“The idea of open RAN was great, but also at the heart and the brains of the network is the core of the network, especially around 5G standalone architecture,” Amin added. “When we looked at the core, we thought, NEC and us, we could do better. We could do better because being 100% cloud-native is very important.”
It will be built on sourcecode developed by NEC, and will go live when Rakuten switches on 5G SA in some parts of its network, targeted for 2021. This makes NEC the primary partner for the core, 5G radio and billing/OSS (Netcracker). The core will bring together containers and supporting technology from partners such as Robin/io, Altiostar, Intel and others.
But the core will have an even bigger burden – as a central element of Rakuten’s gamble on being able to build a business as a telco vendor, as well as an operator, and so drive forward its vision of a fully open, multivendor network. This promises to slash capex and opex costs, reducing operational teams from thousands to hundreds of people (though in the first phase, integrating Rakuten’s network has been very reliant on large numbers of engineers).
The company presumably wants to make some revenue from other operators to offset the costs of this highly customized and homegrown platform. But more importantly, rather like Facebook’s development of product designs for Telecom Infra Project, it has a broader motivation – to drive large scale into new open platforms, so that costs fall still further. That, in turn, would give operators greater elasticity when it comes to setting prices, allowing them to reduce tariffs and so gain new customers, and encourage higher usage levels of new 5G applications.
This is thinking that is more common among webscalers than telcos, and NEC will be hoping to take advantage by positioning itself as a vendor that understands that new way of seeing the telecoms world, and is developing the technologies and services to match.
Other vendors will have the chance to benefit from Rakuten’s stardust if they support its preferred open architectures, such as O-RAN interfaces and RAN Intelligent Controller. Not only will the RCP package up the MNO’s own learnings and some of its technologies, it will establish a marketplace in which third party offerings can be easily procured, with the guarantee that they will all interoperate with other RCP elements.
“It may sound strange that two Japanese companies are now trying to challenge the global telecoms industry, but I’m very confident we will be able to bring the Japan quality platform to the world,” said Rakuten CEO Mickey Mikitani during a press event. He, like Amin before him, was sounding almost Trump-like in talking up a single country’s push to lead in 5G. Not a welcome trend in an industry that should, by its nature, be global and welcome global innovation … though some Japan/USA open networks axis against China is likely to exist more in the headlines than the minds of most operators, given the continuing influence of two Nordic giants.
Atsuo Kawamura, NEC’s president of network services, said in a statement: “Following the BSS/OSS for the 4G network and 5G radio equipment that we have already begun offering, we look forward to providing a high quality, highly reliable 5G core and contributing to Rakuten Mobile’s 5G services.”