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…