The entry of ecommerce giant Rakuten into the Japanese market has been a powerful accelerant for the open RAN fire, providing a proof point that an end-to-end, open, multivendor network can be built. Yes, it may not be (yet) quite as cloud-native as it is billed to be; it may have cost a huge sum in terms of engineering and integration; and Rakuten has the advantages of being a greenfield MNO. All these factors mean its achievement is scarcely replicable by the majority of operators elsewhere. But nevertheless, it injects confidence into the market, and Rakuten will be packaging up its components and knowledge within the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), to make open 5G more accessible to other MNOs. The…