Rakuten Mobile has generally downplayed the need to rely on legacy equipment vendors and traditional technology for its greenfield network in Japan, but the operator is inking deals with some familiar names in telecom all the same.

In addition to supplying Rakuten with open remote radio heads and automation software for its fully virtualized, cloud native network, Nokia has also won a deal to provide the operator with switches and silicon for optical backhaul transport. The pair of deals indicates that incumbent vendors like Nokia still have an important, and potentially unavoidable, role to play in modern network architecture.

Rakuten Mobile is also using equipment, software, and services from Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, NEC, and Airspan for its 4G LTE network that will go live on April 8. Relative newcomers like Altiostar and Mavenir are involved in that effort, but not without an assist from larger, entrenched vendors.

While the operator has built a network that uses a combination of equipment from established and lesser-known vendors, it has also successfully convinced Nokia to open up its optical networking and radio equipment for an open radio access network (RAN), explained Anshel Sag, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

It’s a smart move for Nokia, especially considering its struggles of late, but it also needs more operators to adopt this type of network build-out strategy to make it a valuable effort, Sag explained. “I have to applaud Nokia for embracing change, but at the same time they still need to be competitive on 5G if they want to see serious uptake.”

Rakuten Mobile plans to deploy the Nokia 1830 Photonic Service Switch and Photonic Service Engine 3 chipset to support its optical transport network covering all 47 prefectures throughout Japan. Nokia’s wavelength routing technology will be used for long haul and metro optical networks to create a photonic mesh mobile backhaul network, which is the first of its kind for a mobile operator, according to Rakuten.

Nokia is also working with Rakuten to provide an automated operations environment and a virtualized core network for 5G, which the operator plans to activate later this year.

Involving vendors like Cisco and Nokia in Rakuten’s network means that the industry should not “count out the legacy vendors and their ability to innovate,” said Chris Nicoll, principal analyst at ACG Research. “There is a lot to be said for experience and lessons learned by the established vendors. Both are important to the operators, and in Rakuten's case using larger vendors and innovative products from established vendors such as Airspan provides a safety net in case companies such as Altiostar stumbled in the early going.”

The combined, or middle-of-the-road approach, reflects both a willingness from Nokia and others to open some equipment for a cloud-native network and smaller companies’ inability to deliver critical products or services at a scale required to meet large network demands, according to Nicoll.

“Smaller vendors such as Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, and others, particularly in the [O-RAN Alliance and Telecom Infra Project] environment, are already getting a foothold or are established in networks from Telefónica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Softbank, and Axiata,” Nicoll said.

“But the legacy vendors for now and probably the next three (or more) years provide a basis of stability, feature richness, support, and reliability, which are keys to operators’ success,” he explained. “The tide is changing, certainly, but just because a piece of hardware or software has the Nokia name on it, for example, doesn't mean it is not as open (virtualized or cloud native), competitive or cost effective as smaller vendors virtualized or cloud-native products.”