Rakuten Mobile is holding firm to its goal of deploying 5G this fall after it delayed the rollout blaming supply chain issues related to the COVID-19 crisis.

The greenfield mobile network operator previously ran about six months behind schedule in deploying a 4G LTE network that claims to be the world’s first fully virtualized, cloud native, open radio access network (RAN).

Amid those delays, Rakuten has been accelerating base station installations throughout Japan and is on pace to cover 70% of the country’s population by March 2021. By next summer, the operator expects all of the necessary base stations to be deployed to reach 90% of Japan’s population with coverage, CEO and Chairman Hiroshi Mikitani said during the company’s second quarter of 2020 earnings call.

“More than 10,000 base stations have completed their build up, and we’re waiting for the connections at the moment,” he said, according to a translator.

The operator recently tapped NEC for the procurement of its 5G core that will factor heavily in its standalone 5G network.

The operator also later this year plans to begin conducting tests of its Rakuten Communications Platform in Japan, expanding its mobile vision to other network operators and countries. Running in parallel with its own network design, Rakuten assembled a platform of services to sell packaged and customizable services to other entities for deployment. 

The company presented a demonstration of the platform under development, outlining a four-step process that other operators or enterprises can follow to put together various custom pieces of their network infrastructure. Those steps include selecting core services for security, operations, and enablement; variables for users, spectrum, coverage, and providers for the RAN, core, transport, IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), and rich communication services (RCS); traffic parameters; and finally a checkout process that calculates the number of sites required based on those parameters.

“Very simply, we have been able to build the network because we developed that technology by ourselves. It’s really a dramatic revolution that is going to happen in the networking industry,” Mikitani said. 

Rakuten claims the platform reduces capex for mobile operators by 40% and opex by 30%. 

The global market size of this opportunity, including traditional total network costs for mobile operators, is in the range of $281.8 billion to $375.7 billion annually, according to Mikitani. “That’s what we are targeting.”

Governments in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. are interested in the open RAN framework and more than 70 operators and governments worldwide have inquired about the platform to date, according to Rakuten.

The Rakuten Mobile unit lost nearly $475.2 million on almost $410 million in revenue during the quarter.