Rakuten Mobile is on the verge of reaching full-year EBITDA profitability on operations for the first time – more than seven years after its foundation in January 2018. This is significant since this was the first full Open RAN greenfield, followed by Dish Network in the US, and 1&1 in Germany. Fortunes remain mixed for these principal greenfields, including Rakuten Mobile, at a time that brownfield Open RAN at last seems to be gaining momentum in the wake of AT&T’s $14 billion five-year deal with Ericsson, announced in December 2023. That has been followed by a few more significant brownfield Open RAN projects that are essentially single-vendor deployments at this stage, sometimes with ambitions to open up to other suppliers…