Rakuten has created a dedicated business, Rakuten Symphony, to house the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), and provide a whole range of products and services for operators that want to deploy cloud-based mobile networks. As well as pre-integrated hardware and software and an Open RAN marketplace, Rakuten will offer network-as-a-service and software-as-a-service to save smaller and new operators, in particular, from the time and expense to integrate a multivendor virtualized network from scratch themselves. Symphony will have the RCP at its heart. The platform has its first public commercial customer, 1&1 Drillisch of Germany (see separate item), and claims commercial engagements with a long list of unnamed telcos and enterprise providers, and some that have offered public support (such as Etisalat…