Japan’s leading MNO, NTT Docomo, is driving scale into the open RAN industry by announcing an alliance of partners. Docomo has a long history of gathering favored vendors and working closely with them to develop cutting edge technologies. The difference this time is that the focus is on open specifications, and some of the cooperative work could be fed back into the wider O-RAN community.
Its initial chosen vendors include long-standing local partners Fujitsu and NEC, with which Docomo has co-developed technologies for 3G, 4G and 5G – the new international prominence of these two owes a great deal to their cooperations with such a demanding telco customer over the years.
This shows how open platforms could be leveraged to expand Japan’s own role in the global industry – NEC’s success with operators such as Rakuten and O2 UK, and Fujitsu’s with Dish, hold out the prospect of Japan becoming a global center of excellence for open 5G radios. Docomo’s sister company NTT Data is also in the line-up.
But there are plenty of international partners too. These are Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Xilinx on the chip side (very high performance merchant processor platforms will be critical to enable an open software platform that can deliver exacting vRAN requirement). Delivering various elements of the cloud infrastructure for open vRAN are Dell, Red Hat, VMware and Wind River. However, by contrast with most early operator-led open RAN initiatives, there is limited participation by the emerging breed of providers of O-RAN virtual network functions (VNFs). Mavenir, which provides O-RAN equipment and software as well as VCore and IMS offerings, is the only RAN software vendor on this initial list – VNF and open small cell providers such as Altiostar (which is partly owned by Rakuten), Parallel and JMA are not yet included.
Docomo’s action could also be a counterweight to the bid by Japan’s new mobile entrant, Rakuten, to be the ecosystem leader in O-RAN, with its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP). The leading Japanese MNO has already deployed a network based on O-RAN in Tokyo, though plans to activate it last year were put on hold as it was supposed to be serving the postponed Olympic Games.
Docomo’s new ‘5G Open RAN Ecosystem’ aims to accelerate the introduction of disaggregated and open RAN capabilities, while positioning the operator to be a prime integrator. Like Rakuten, that would open up the opportunity to generate a new revenue stream based on services to other operators round the world, especially smaller MNOs or enterprise network deployers, which will often lack the depth of engineering resources and RAN expertise that Docomo has accumulated over the decades.
According to Rakuten Mobile’s CTO Tareq Amin, RCP now has 15 customers. “These are not small customers. Some of them are very, very massive,” he told a media briefing last week. “I’m really delighted to see that we finally are reaching a stage where possibly in the next quarter or so we have a very large contract about the entire RCP stack.”
Docomo said it will define best-of-breed RAN solutions based on integrating offerings from its ecosystem members, and will devote its own R&D resources to enhance vRAN and open RAN technologies to deliver some of the key requirements for at-scale macro network roll-outs, notably “higher flexibility and scalability”. It also plans – as Rakuten has done for RCP – to create a verification platform so that other operators can assess open RAN options remotely.