Rakuten Mobile had already dealt a blow to Red Hat’s hopes of leading the Open RAN cloud layer in May, when it said it would replace its initial partner with the Robin.io orchestration and cloud automation technology (Rakuten has also acquired Robin.io). Now it has announced further distancing from Red Hat, replacing its Linux operating system with Rocky Linux OS, from open source distributor CIQ. Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony, claimed the change would reduce the cost of the OS by 80%, and support a real time kernel for processing the most demanding RAN functions in distributed units (DUs) at the network edge. Rakuten Symphony will deploy the technology as part of its stack, which it…