Rakuten Mobile’s dream of becoming the world’s first end-to-end cloud native network operator has been realized, company executives claimed during its third quarter earnings presentation.

The subsidiary of the e-commerce juggernaut is building a greenfield network in Japan that is now providing 4G LTE service to about 5,000 customers on a trial basis. The company hopes to commercially deploy service in the first few months of 2020 followed by 5G later in the year, although it declined to provide any new updates on that timeline this week.

The operator has faced some deployment delays, but executives boasted nearly endless optimism about its achievements to date, including a series of firsts for the industry at large. “Rakuten Mobile has become the world’s largest virtual network function operator across 1,400 different operators, so this has been a big accomplishment. It is no longer a hypothesis or a dream. This has now been deployed, [it is] operational, secure, and most importantly, validated for resiliency architecture,” CTO Tareq Amin said.

Rakuten Mobile also claims to be the world’s largest virtual radio access network (vRAN) vendor. “We provided this together with Altiostar [and] solved very complex problems,” Amin said. “People said we could not do this. It is now fully operational, carrying a massive amount of traffic in the network” with full resiliency and redundancy, he said.

The third claim is a doozy. “We have built more edge locations than even Amazon has done in the United States,” Amin said.

The company, which received regulatory clearance to become Japan’s fourth nationwide carrier in April 2018, is emphasizing three areas of focus as part of that effort: core technologies, RAN buildout, and customer acquisition strategies.

“Cloud technologies offer resiliencies that are much better than what you find today in traditional telecommunication networks,” Amin said. The resiliency that Rakuten Mobile has gained through that approach doesn’t exist in any other network around the world, he claimed. “Across two of our large data centers every application today is fully redundant in an active configuration.”

Rakuten Mobile recently shut down its network to simulate and test its resiliency during disastrous circumstances. The sessions recovered for voice, data, and continuity in a manner that impressed Rakuten executives, Amin explained.

Hundreds of telecom operators have approached Rakuten to learn more about the core technologies it has deployed across the network, according to Amin. Beyond its efforts in Japan, the company is seeking to export this technology from Japan and deliver it across the globe. “This is where it sets the potential opportunity for Rakuten Mobile post our successful Japan launch,” he said.

Amin also pointed to costs as one of the leading factors that is driving Rakuten’s interest in vRAN. Operators spend the bulk of their capital on RAN, not the core, and the spend required for 5G gets even worse, he said. “That’s why we spent most of our energy on trying to virtualize the radio access because the cost impact, and the economics, and the benefits that this will bring to Rakuten is too important and tremendous for our future growth.”

That work has enabled Rakuten to deploy macro antenna base stations that “hardly have any electronics at locations,” Amin said. “We have moved all of our workloads to our edge data centers. That makes things easier for deployment, construction costs are cheaper, [and] operation and maintenance requirements are substantially cheaper than traditional networks. We think this is the future, this is how you build telecoms of the future.”

Rakuten Mobile is also among the few operators that are focused on the supply chain, he said. The company in June inked a deal jointly develop a 3.7 GHz massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) 5G radio that will be manufactured by NEC in Japan.

“The simplicity of the sites have enabled us to really achieve a level of turning on sites per day that I personally have not seen in any other telecom,” Amin said. “Almost every day, 60 to 70 sites come on air daily. So we are very confident that by the end of the year we will have about 3,000 sites on air, if not even more.”

Rakuten Mobile has also signed 4,500 contracts with property owners for access to deploy these radios, with an additional 6,500 contracts in process, he said. “We’re very confident that we have validated the model of our technologies. Coverage we’re increasing daily and it’s going to get better as time progresses.”

As the operator continues on its 5G march, costs are going to be cut significantly along with increased flexibility, said Hiroshi Mikitani, founder, chairman and CEO and Rakuten. “The former leading telecom companies — I think they were being dominated by hardware manufacturers, but with us we can do everything by ourselves,” he said.