Rakuten Mobile isn’t going far, less than 10 miles in fact, for the procurement of its 5G core. The subsidiary of the ecommerce juggernaut tapped NEC, a fellow Japanese company also based in Tokyo, to build a standalone (SA) 5G core that will be deployed next year.

The greenfield operator, which recently activated a 4G LTE network that claims to be the world’s first fully virtualized, cloud native, open radio access network (RAN), last month abruptly delayed its 5G timeline by about three months due to some supply chain issues related to the COVID-19 crisis.

Rakuten Mobile said it will activate non-standalone (NSA) 5G service later this year, and commercialize its SA 5G service riding on NEC’s 5G core in 2021. NEC is also providing 3.8 GHz 5G radios for Rakuten’s mobile network.

The ascension of 5G has gained interest from a wider pool of vendors that hope to earn new business in telecom by supplying a 5G core, related services, and software. The playing field has expanded to include hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS); cloud vendors like Oracle and VMware; traditional RAN vendors Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia; and others focused on enterprises like Hewlett Packard Enterpise (HPE).

“The idea of open RAN was great, but also at the heart and the brains of the network is the core of the network, especially around 5G standalone architecture,” Rakuten Mobile EVP and CTO Tareq Amin said during a press conference.

Amin described the deal with NEC as a “world-first activity” that will fuel open architecture, open source platforms, and collective innovation on critical network components and services. “It’s not about a vendor-operator relationship,” he said, but rather a collaborative effort to design and build an open RAN compliant 5G core.

“To my knowledge, this is the world’s first 5G open RAN platform,” Amin said. Benefits of this approach include “cost efficiencies that I think are unimaginable in the traditional telecom world” and greater control over the supply chain and the security issues that can arise in the procurement process, he explained. 

“When we looked at the core, we thought, NEC and us, we could do better. We could do better because the importance of being 100% cloud native is very important,” Amin said. The collaborative approach is “very untraditional,” he added. “The ideas of source code sharing and joint development is very unusual and unorthodox in this day and age."

While the savings Rakuten is experiencing on capex is disruptive, the operator has “obviously had issues recently executing” and “I don’t buy COVID-19 as an excuse” for its 5G network delays, Will Townsend, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SDxCentral.

Indeed, Amin completely changed his 5G tune in the span of four weeks after telling SDxCentral that the pandemic wasn’t having any impact on its 5G construction plans. The operator’s 4G LTE network also went live about six months behind schedule after Amin and his team encountered challenges in integrating operations and business support services (OSS and BSS).

There are also some limits to Rakuten Mobile’s notion of “openness,” particularly as it relates to its parallel effort to assemble a platform of services to sell packaged and customizable services to other entities for deployment beyond the reach of Rakuten’s network. Rakuten is open insofar as it’s not using traditional infrastructure and proprietary services from incumbent RAN vendors, Townsend said.

Rakuten Mobile is also taking a “high risk” by turning to a relatively unproven vendor for a 5G mobile core, according to Townsend. It “would have been smarter to partner with a pure-play software provider such as Mavenir that has a solid track record,” he said. Mavenir is working with the operator on other network services. 

“Rakuten Mobile is the first customer of the Rakuten Communication Platform, but I believe in the future this platform is very well suited for government, for enterprises and for mobile operators,” Amin said. “This is the unvendor platform.”