Rakuten Mobile continues to tighten its alliances with vendors to try to accelerate “global expansion” of its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), which aims to provide pre-integrated, mix-and-match hardware and software to enable operators to deploy Open Ran networks relatively cheaply and easily. At least, more cheaply and easily than Rakuten itself, which is widely thought to have underestimated the cost and complexity of integrating and optimizing a cloud-native 4G/5G network from scratch. It had hundreds of engineers working on the project, but hopes to offset the costs (and the low levels of mobile revenues it has generated so far) by turning RCP into a professional services business. It has signed memorandums of understanding with two Japanese vendors to support this…