Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin claims none of the operator’s infrastructure is underperforming, but telco cloud software is thus far failing to meet the moment industry wide.

“Despite so much hype around virtualization, the underlying architecture of the software platforms that are used, whether it is IMS [IP multimedia subsystem] core, policy functions, OCS [online charging system] function, there is not a single vendor in the world that supports elasticity,” he said during a group chat with analysts and press. 

“It is not good enough to move the software architecture from monolithic architecture that was built on proprietary hardware and say I’m going to shift to a virtual machine. To achieve the dream and the benefits of cloudification, the software architecture must evolve to support elasticity,” Amin said.

Moving a telco workload to the cloud does not enable elasticity, he explained. “There is no magic that an Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft could enable because the underlying software architecture is absolutely flawed. It needs to evolve,” he said. 

“I don’t think the industry as a whole has forced the vendors to advance the software architecture in the same way enterprise and over-the-top players have advanced. Auto elasticity does not exist. Orchestration in a way that you want it holistically across the network doesn’t exist,” Amin said. 

No telco software is meeting “Rakuten’s objective for auto elasticity as a network function across multiple geographies with auto-healing enabled,” he said, adding that the operator is pushing vendors to “think like an enterprise IT company, not necessarily a legacy IT software provider.”

Rakuten’s telco workloads are performing as expected, but Amin said he isn’t happy that those workloads still don’t meet his definition of cloud-native architecture. “We still have a lot of work to do with the industry and ecosystem to push this modernization of the software stack to move into the right destination for auto elasticity, auto healing, resiliency, and so on, into the fabric of the cloud networks.”

Software remains underestimated and neglected, or unwilling to embrace cloud-native principles, he argued. Despite software inadequacies, “we have really enabled hyperscale automation into the DNA of this network.”

Rakuten Mobile’s experience thus far in assembling a nationwide open radio access network (RAN) in Japan proves the advantages operators can achieve by transitioning network architecture to pure software functions as virtual machines or container network functions, including operational efficiency gains, lower costs, and agility in providing new services, according to Amin.

Now it intends to prove that more broadly. Rakuten Communications Platform, an ecosystem of telco software, open RAN hardware, network infrastructure components, and support services that the ecommerce giant is packaging to resell to other operators, will later this summer publish the true costs of every application and piece of gear to further underline the cost savings it claims operators can achieve with open RAN.

The operator isn’t interested in making margins on open RAN hardware, Amin claimed. It’s publishing a digital product catalog of the larger open RAN ecosystem to disclose all costs. “Rakuten can participate and provide support and services. If you don’t want us to participate, not an issue, we could link you directly to the manufacturer,” he said. 

“We want to change how the industry consumes products, and we want to be transparent about the hardware prices. No longer we will hold this as a secret in the industry. Let it go out. Let everybody know exactly what is the cost of radio products,” including complex massive MIMO radios Amin said.

Moreover, he claims Rakuten will soon announce “one of the most advanced distributed units at a cost structure I am confident will shock the DNA of this industry.”

The distributed unit (DU) for radio access in an open RAN environment, a platform he expects to get commoditized on massive MIMO in the next two years, is something that desperately needs to be addressed and fixed, he said. “I still think the DU of the current open RAN platform is absolutely suboptimal, and it is unoptimized, and it’s missing a lot of things to make it competitive.”

Rakuten is working with Intel to develop a reference design that will integrate a CPU and hardware acceleration into a commoditized processor in 2022, he said.