Japan’s Rakuten Group scooped up U.S.-based open radio access (RAN) network equipment provider Altiostar for more than $1 billion. The move expands on an already established financial partnership between the two companies and bolsters Rakuten’s internal work toward creating an open RAN ecosystem.

The deal brings Altiostar under Rakuten’s umbrella that is perched on top of its Rakuten Mobile operations. The Japanese operator launched the first greenfield, fully virtualized open RAN network at scale to support 4G LTE in April 2020, and added 5G support last September. Altiostar played a role in the 5G upgrade that included a container-based, cloud-native 5G RAN.

Altiostar is also working with Airtel in India, Dish Network in the United States, and Telefonica in Europe and Latin America.

Specific financial terms beyond the $1 billion-plus price tag were not released, but Rakuten was part of Altiostar’s $114 million Series C funding round that closed in 2019. Altiostar had raised more than $357 million in total funding prior to the Rakuten acquisition.

Altiostar’s current CEO Ashraf Dahod will maintain his role and take on oversight of Rakuten’s Communications Platform (RCP) operations. Altiostar will also continue to operate out of its Tewksbury, Massachusetts, headquarters.

Dahod founded Altiostar in 2011 with a focus on extending open RAN interfaces and architectures. The vendor’s open RAN software for 4G and 5G networks is independent of the virtualization stack, so it can be ported to different virtualization environments and orchestration layers, including those from Cisco, VMware, and Red Hat.

“We’re agnostic and we have very standard interfaces between us and the orchestration layer and the virtualization layer,” Dahod said in a previous interview with SDxCentral, adding it usually takes about six to eight weeks to integrate with a new vendor.

“Once your radio is installed and plugged into the fiber or transport network, we recognize the radio and then we invoke the appropriate functions for the orchestration layer that then allows the VNFs to be created,” he explained. That, including software that must be downloaded to the radio for configuration, is “done automatically and we can bring up a site in less than 10 minutes.”

Altiostar is also a cog in RCP. That platform was unveiled last year, and is a combination of Rakuten's various technical and intellectual property that it’s using to construct its software-centric network in Japan. It includes telco applications and software from different vendors, operating support and business support systems (OSS/BSS) to deal with billing and activation, edge computing, and virtual network management functions. Rakuten claims the platform reduces capex for mobile operators by 40% and opex by 30%.

Other RCP vendors include Cisco, Intel, Mavenir, NEC, Nokia, Red Hat, and Qualcomm.

Rakuten’s RCP efforts run alongside similar moves from other software vendors.

Microsoft, for instance, has been aggressively bolstering its Azure for Operators platform that includes services for the cloud, edge computing, IoT, network functions, and artificial intelligence. The hyperscaler’s 5G strategy links private Azure Edge Zones, Azure IoT Central, virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC) software it gained by acquiring Affirmed Networks, and cloud-native network functions it brought on board when it acquired Metaswitch Networks.

AT&T in late June sold its Network Cloud technology to Microsoft and shifted gears to move its 5G network core, workloads, and services to Microsoft’s Azure for Operators platform.