Rakuten Symphony picked Juniper Network’s radio access network (RAN) intelligent controller (RIC) to be the sole RIC available as part of its Symworld Platform. The move builds on a long-standing relationship between the two toward powering the open RAN ecosystem.

The Juniper RIC will be embedded in the Symworld Platform application. This application includes the horizontal operational layer that provides open interfaces for the further deployment and integration of accessory services and systems.

Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony, said this will allow operators to push quickly beyond the initial integration challenges of setting up an open telecom system.

“It takes today, on average, anywhere between seven and nine months to onboard one application. We want to change that seven to nine months to a single day,” Amin said during a press briefing on the news. “This is way that I felt at Rakuten Mobile that we suffered, we suffered significantly from what I call the SI work that happens and we want to change this paradigm.”

That SI, or systems integration, challenge Amin noted has been an ongoing issue with cloud-based 5G deployments.

The RIC operates in the middle of an open RAN deployment as a kind of linkage to the wider network. It allows operators to deploy so-called xApps that then allow operators to design and control RAN functions, providing administrative RAN sovereignty over functions that are typically implemented as proprietary features on base stations.

Juniper entered the RIC space in early 2021 through a licensing agreement it inked with Netsia, a subsidiary of Turk Telekom Group, to provide the vendor with exclusive rights to its RIC source code and patents. At that time, Juniper said it planned to differentiate its O-RAN Alliance-based RIC from others by pre-integrating and validating the technology so operators can adopt it as part of a more comprehensive offering combined with other services.

The vendor soon moved to integrate its RIC into Intel’s FlexRAN platform for open RAN development, which was quickly followed by Rakuten joining those efforts.

Amin said Rakuten “looked at different options. Do we build this ourselves or do we partner with someone else? And we really believe that we never had an industry leading, commercially ready not in real-time at real-time RIC that could be easily integrated with our platform.”

Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim during the call cited Juniper’s past work in the RIC space, including a multivendor RIC trial with European telecom giant Vodafone and open RAN provider Parallel Wireless.

The RIC addition further bolsters Rakuten Symworld’s platform, which also includes open RAN functions and services, security, service assurance, and operations and business support services (OSS/BSS).

Rakuten formed its Symphony division last year with a focus on expanding its open RAN architecture into more networks around the world. The division initially housed the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) and Rakuten’s various open RAN technology assets and services.

The RCP platform earlier this year was rebranded as Symworld following its acquisition of Robin.io. The company at that time also inked deals with AT&T, Cisco, Nokia, and Qualcomm.

Rakuten more recently signed a deal to host that all-encompassing cloud-native telecom platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and added a new edge-focused component to the platform with plans to use those capabilities on its home network in Japan.