Azita Arvani knows how difficult it is to make open radio access networks (RAN) work properly, but she believes those challenges can be overcome by those that fully embrace the vision.

The GM of Rakuten Mobile Americas was working at Nokia when Rakuten decided to become a mobile network operator in Japan and it worked with Nokia to integrate its remote radio heads with services from Altiostar and other vendors for its 4G LTE network that launched in April 2020. 

“We all know that’s the future. It’s like how far are we going to push ourselves in that direction?” she told SDxCentral in a recent phone interview. The intellectual property and technical expertise that Rakuten has developed since 2018 is now being sold as a customizable platform, Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), that other operators can turn to for their open RAN planning, deployment, and management requirements.

The operator is targeting three categories of prospective customers — mobile operators, enterprises interested in private networks, and governments — but it doesn’t have any customers announced to date, said Arvani, who leads the RCP effort in the Americas.

Dish Network, another aspiring greenfield open RAN operator, is the most obvious opportunity for RCP in the U.S., but the satellite TV operator has hired extensively and is tapping its own group of vendors to assemble a 5G network. It’s unclear where or how RCP might fit into that framework. Dish is a natural partner because of its greenfield status and the companies have had multiple high-level conversations, “but nothing to announce at this point,” Arvani said.

However, she added, “RCP is not just for somebody who is starting from scratch.” Subsets of the platform can also help brownfield operators adopt open RAN at their respective pace, she said.

Arvani argues that RCP is a “state of the art” and “future-proof” platform, admittedly cliche claims, because it breaks network architecture into smaller pieces, allowing for greater contribution from more vendors, and it adheres to a level of flexibility that allows for open interfaces and layers to innovate and flourish. 

“As requirements change, you can bring in other things,” she said. “We have like almost 10 different radios, depending on the use case we have and from different companies, and that flexibility could not exist if you didn’t go to open RAN,” she said referring to Rakuten Mobile’s network in Japan.

“Not every operator can do the integration on their own, and that’s why we think that by doing it in this platform way that allows less integration, so not everybody has to go and reinvent the wheel,” Arvani said. 

Rakuten is also taking three different approaches to facilitate ongoing research and development into its RCP and open RAN at large. The company is consistently on the hunt for new partners that can improve or otherwise further validate the platform, it’s acquiring or investing in companies that it considers strategic, and it has about 1,500 engineers with broad skills in cloud-native technology and telecommunications, according to Arvani. 

While most industry leaders have generally committed to open architecture and cloud-native principles, many operators are still hesitant to make further commitments to open RAN simply because it’s easier to stick with the status quo, she said. Rakuten hopes its platform will minimize and help operators overcome many of those concerns. 

The framework, Arvani admits, is different because Rakuten is an operator that’s also now trying to sell a platform of à la carte network services. “We think that it’s unusual, it’s unique, but it’s also hopefully very useful to mobile operators,” she said.

Rakuten began demonstrating the RCP platform in August and claims it reduces capex for mobile operators by 40% and opex by 30%. Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, at the time, said the global market for a platform like RCP, including traditional network costs for mobile operators, reaches up to $375 billion annually.

Rakuten’s interests paired with how it’s assembled a more integrated platform for open RAN has generated some skepticism, especially among companies that question the company’s motives or ponder how close it is to becoming another vertically integrated platform of sorts. Arvani said she appreciates these concerns and understands where they’re coming from, but she also dismisses them according to the merits of Rakuten’s vision for RCP and open RAN overall. 

“We don’t want to become this virtualized cloud native version of the current vendors,” she said. “Our commitment has always been to open architecture, and this RCP that we offer is a multi-vendor solution.”

Prospective customers of RCP can pick and choose any approved vendors and Rakuten works behind the scenes to onboard those respective hardware or software vendors to frame it as part of a more holistic offering instead of point solutions that are stitched together, Arvani explained. “If you think of this whole thing as a mosaic of hardware and software components, if you continuously look at where can I cut costs and improve the agility of the platform, that’s what we’ve done,” she said.

“Our objective is to make the underlying connectivity layer as accessible, and affordable, and agile as possible, so then other services can go on top of it,” Arvani said. “Connectivity is not the end for all, for us it’s the means to an end.”