Rakuten Symphony had a substantial presence at MWC Americas, no doubt keen to promote its platform to US operators – and if Symphony is spun off, as is widely rumored, its likely new home base would be in the USA, where there is hefty political will to build a homegrown 5G RAN industry again. The vendor/integrator arm of Japan’s Rakuten made a string of announcements and demonstrations, including an Open RAN distributed unit (DU) that Symphony claims will address many of the cost and complexity challenges that concern would-be O-RAN adopters. The DU is based on Symphony’s own server design, running on an Intel Xeon D processor with FPGA-based acceleration for Layer 1 network processes. This supports DU software from…