While major vendors are seeking to turn early products and partnerships into full-blown ecosystems for Open RAN (see separate item), Rakuten Symphony has leapt ahead of them all thanks to its own early experience as an Open RAN deployer in Japan. Last year, Rakuten Group set up a separate subsidiary, Symphony, to commercialize the integration and experience gained by its MNO unit’s cloud-native roll-out. It will package and pre-integrate solutions based on its own choice of suppliers and will expand these to include other options too, while offering paid-for integration, testing and deployment services. Symphony already counts as the second largest integrator of Open RANs (in a very early market), after one of its closest ecosystem partners, NEC. At Mobile…