Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin earlier this year pledged to be transparent about the cost of network hardware, but that doesn’t mean he’s publicly sharing those prices. This level of transparency extends to Rakuten Symphony customers and ends there, he explained in a recent phone interview.

“What this means, it’s very simple, they know exactly to the dollar how much we’re spending on procuring any element … and then I tell them here is the price,” Amin said. 

When Amin initially made this pledge six months ago, he said Rakuten would publicly disclose and publish the costs of every application and piece of gear in a digital product catalog to underline the cost savings it claims operators can achieve with open radio access network (RAN) architecture.

It now sounds like he got ahead of himself on that one. 

“If I share my component prices with the world, then my suppliers will most likely sue. But with my customers I have all the rights and all the authorities, because I have a legal framework of a contract, so I share my pricing and my entire cost structure with all the customers that sign contractually with Rakuten Symphony,” he said.

“I’ve been in this business for 30-plus years. If I asked a vendor to share with me their component costs or bill of materials, I assure you 100% not a single one of them will do this,” Amin added. 

Rakuten Symphony, a newly formed corporation following a formal split from its Rakuten parent, claims contracts with at least 14 customers worth about $2.6 billion to date, including Germany’s greenfield operator 1&1 Drillisch. 

It sells various open RAN services, including the recently acquired Altiostar, and software and hardware it procures, packages, and pre-integrates from other vendors. 

Because hardware is a key network element, often sagged with heavy costs due to tightly controlled systems integrated with proprietary technology, open RAN pioneers like Rakuten want network infrastructure hardware to be commoditized. It’s a tenet of open RAN and the widely promoted push to disaggregate hardware and open network interfaces. 

Mobile network operators can buy open RAN provisioned equipment directly from the hardware supplier or Rakuten Symphony if they prefer more hands-on support. 

On the hardware front, Amin is keenly interested in advanced silicon architecture for telco workloads, basebands, and radios. One realization of this is the recently announced Symware appliance. Rakuten jointly developed the appliance with Intel and Juniper Networks, and it features containerized cell site routing functions and a containerized distributed unit (DU) on a single-rack, general-purpose server.

Qualcomm’s vow to break into the 5G RAN chipset market also has Amin particularly intrigued. “I think Qualcomm is going to change the world with their new cell site modem, especially what we are going to commit to work with them on for the creation of a 64T64R [massive MIMO radio] at an unbelievable cost structure that the planet has not seen,” he said. 

“This is absolutely going to be a breakthrough platform,” Amin added. 

Radios and servers that run converged cell site router functions, including DU functionality, comprise about 70% of operators’ average capex, according to Amin. “If we are able to do something materialistic and reduce the cost by 40% to 50%, that’s a big win for the industry.”