Rakuten Mobile may have created an enormous splash with its cloud-native 5G network deployment, and has now built a new business, Symphony, to commercialize that. But as a challenger MNO in Japan, its commercial impact has been very muted compared to some other new entrant MNOs, which managed to disrupt established players very effectively with far less innovative architectures than Rakuten’s. Free Mobile in France and Reliance Jio in India are just two examples, and by contrast, Rakuten has created barely a single sleepless night for Japan’s existing MNOs – NTT Docomo, KDDI and Softbank. Indeed, one reason for its limited success in gaining market share has been the pre-emptive price cuts that Docomo, in particular, introduced when Rakuten…