Rakuten Mobile intends to deploy Cisco’s Routed Optical Network offering paired with segment routing over IPv6 to support enterprise services on its forthcoming 5G standalone (SA) network core. 

The Japanese mobile network operator, which operates a virtualized and cloud-native open radio access network (RAN), said pluggable optics and segment routing will lower its operational costs, speed up time to market, and bolster support for 5G network slicing and IoT. 

Rakuten Mobile also called out its desire to support more stringent service level agreements with enterprises, claiming Cisco’s flattened internet infrastructure, including a routed optical network portfolio featuring Acacia pluggagle optics, will form the backbone of that architecture.

Cisco acquired Acacia Communications earlier this year, following a hard-fought battle over price, and eventually agreed to up its original and 18-month-old offer by 73% to $4.5 billion. 

Rakuten Mobile said this architecture will allow it to introduce SRv6 micro-segments and manage multi-domain 5G deployments across its network. By consolidating coherent pluggable optics into a router, Rakuten claims it can introduce more automation and deploy services in 40 days, compared to 100 days today, and reduce power consumption by almost 30%.

Cisco’s broader “internet for the future” framework includes Acacia pluggable optics, converged SDN transport, network automation, and Cisco Silicon One, a programmable silicon architecture it first revealed in late 2019. 

Network operators “are spending on average about $5 for managing infrastructure for every dollar they’re spending in actually acquiring infrastructure, and those ratios are only going to get worse as traffic continues to grow,” Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM at Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, told SDxCentral in a recent interview.

“We’re trying to create a new architecture that simplifies the layers and enables a much more interoperable future that we’ve always had in IP that now we’re extending into the optical domain. We’re also proposing an architecture that over time you actually move optical services on top of IP. Today, IP runs on top of optical services,” he explained.

The network infrastructure juggernaut claims it can achieve a 46% reduction in total cost of ownership for network operators that move down this architectural path. That path effectively collapses IP and optical networks with a routed optical networking portfolio, improvements in segment routing, and cloud services, according to the vendor.

Cisco’s been involved in Rakuten’s greenfield network since the beginning, and the vendor’s Customer Experience team will assist Rakuten Mobile in the design and implementation of the new architecture, the companies said. 

“Reimagining mobile networking is at the very heart of Rakuten Mobile’s strategy, and our decision to go full-speed ahead on SRv6 and Cisco Routed Optical Networking demonstrates our effort to take advantage of technology innovation at every layer of the stack,” Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin said in a statement.

Rakuten Mobile today also showcased results of a containerized 5G SA core trial with NEC and Intel that delivered 640 Gb/s per server for the containerized user plane function (UPF). The Tokyo lab trial occured on a 5G SA core developed by Rakuten Mobile and NEC running on the Rakuten Communications Platform. 

Rakuten last year tapped NEC, a fellow Japanese company, to build its 5G SA core. The operator, at that time, said it would deploy its 5G SA core in 2021. NEC is also supplying Rakuten with 3.8 GHz 5G radios for its network.

Intel, another longtime vendor for Rakuten, supplied its third generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors for the 5G SA core trial.

“Rakuten Mobile has successfully designed and built a fully containerized mobile network based on open standards,” Amin said in a statement. “With NEC and Intel, we have demonstrated that extremely high-speed processing is possible on containers. We aim to continue to pursue performance improvements in the core to achieve higher throughput and reduce cost and energy consumption in the rollout of network technology in Japan and worldwide.”