Rakuten was the toast of this year’s Mobile World Congress with its ambitious plan to build an end-to-end cloud-native mobile network for 4G and 5G. Since then, the project has lost some of its luster thanks to delays, and reports of significant challenges with tuning up the cloud infrastructure to support the demands of a virtualized RAN. There have also been whispers about ‘too many cooks’, and tensions between the long list of suppliers which are involved in the project, highlighting the downside of an open, multivendor approach. Some of the participants have strong 4G offerings but are not sufficiently 5G-ready for Rakuten’s timetable, sources say, and there is overlap between the responsibilities of some of the partners with integration…