Rakuten Mobile and Telefónica today inked an agreement to collaborate on the advancement of open radio access networks (RAN) including the 5G core and operations support systems (OSS).

The upstart greenfield operator and nearly century-old telecommunications provider have relatively little in common, but the companies do share a vision for a complete overhaul of how mobile networks are built, managed, and delivered. 

Technology leaders at both companies frame open RAN as a foregone conclusion, dismissing the proprietary and closed nature of traditional systems, but also claim that their goal is more broad than a displacement of incumbent RAN vendors Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, and Samsung.

“This is a massive opportunity for all of us, and this is an inclusive approach. This is not that we are looking for new vendors, it is how we can guarantee that we are building the new industry rules,” Enrique Blanco, CTO and CIO at Telefónica said during a virtual press event.

Telefónica, which operates networks in multiple countries, is standing up open RAN pilots today and expects massive commercial deployments of open RAN to get underway in 2022. “I hope in the first quarter of 2022 we will be building a massive deployment in one of our main operations,” Blanco said. 

The operator will deploy open RAN base stations next year and intends to transition at least 50% of its markets to open RAN by 2025, according to Blanco. 

Traditional radio vendors are precluding, or otherwise limiting the potential for mobile network operators to deliver on the promise of 5G, he said. “We are trying to open the ecosystem for new systems integrators. … If we can open this, we can solve a significant part of the problem.”

Tareq Amin, EVP and CTO at Rakuten Mobile, echoed Blanco’s assessment of the dynamics at play, claiming that the effort is “not necessarily about competition, but it’s really a defining moment for industry transformation,” and one that is long overdue.

“If you look at the traditional radio access network it is all proprietary. I think it is high time for us to accept that change is imminent and change is important,” he said. 

“We need to move away from a radio that was completely proprietary, an interface that was completely locked, and a baseband that was completely built on hardware and an infrastructure that I call inelastic and very inefficient, to a world in which 5G is completely open,” Amin said.

Rakuten Mobile activated the world’s first fully virtualized, cloud-native open 4G LTE RAN in April and previously said it plans to deploy 5G service this month. That 4G LTE network arrived six months behind schedule and the operator abruptly delayed its 5G deployment by about three months, blaming supply chain and testing issues tied to the COVID-19 crisis for the delay. 

Telefónica and Rakuten Mobile’s agreement calls for the operators to research and conduct all matters of trials on open RAN architecture, including the role of artificial intelligence (AI), jointly developed proposals for 5G open RAN, and a scheme for the procurement of open RAN hardware and software.