Rakuten Mobile and Dish Network have more in common than not. The greenfield 5G operators — one successfully so, and the other still aspiring to be — are leading the way on open radio access network (RAN) architecture and trying to prove to the industry there’s a better way to build, manage, and serve wireless connectivity to the masses.

Until recently, at least formally, the companies haven’t had a direct business relationship. That changed last month when Dish announced plans to use Rakuten Symphony’s observability framework (OBF) for real-time telemetry and elasticity for virtual and cloud-native network functions (VNFs and CNFs). 

A tie-up, insofar as the companies currently have, seemed inevitable. But is more coming? Does this first wave of open RAN for 5G necessitate a joint venture or an outright merger or acquisition (M&A) involving Dish and Rakuten?

“I don’t think that there is any plan about M&A or anything like that. However, I think both companies share quite a bit of underlying heritage and our desire to not live within the status quo,” said Tareq Amin, CTO at Rakuten Mobile who now concurrently serves as Rakuten Symphony’s CEO.

Amin and his team admire Dish’s leadership and entrepreneurial spirit. “Sometimes we feel both of us have something to prove to the world. We’re both locked to the same destiny,” he said in a phone interview.

The companies’ leadership teams share a uniquely similar vision, which makes for natural discussions about project plans, including the common challenges and strategies required to overcome issues exclusive to open RAN architecture. 

“We are linked culturally in how we run our organizations and we are also linked to the technology choices that both companies have made,” Amin said.

Work between the companies goes beyond Rakuten Symphony’s collection of open RAN software and hardware designs. This means Dish has “unlimited access to everybody, not just the Symphony team,” he said.

“The success of Dish to the overall industry is just too important,” Amin continued. “The approach that we have taken is whatever it takes” to support Dish and help it realize its goals, and “we’re committed to be there for them.”

In the most obvious sense today, this includes Dish’s adoption of Rakuten Symphony’s OBF and operational support systems (OSS) services. It’s important to “appreciate the disruption that such technology would bring in” to the market, Amin claims.

Traditional mobile network architecture includes elements in the radio, core, and IP that connect to an element management system (EMS) which in turn connects to OSS. This system talks to a data lake for mediation and analytics systems run on top of that, he explained. 

“This is too archaic as we move into a true cloud-native architecture, as we move into a real-time requirement to monitor the CNFs and VNFs in the network,” Amin said. OBF is specifically designed to remove EMS, legacy architecture, and underlying data platforms from the equation.

The same technology has been used by hyperscalers for decades, he said. Rakuten Sympony’s OBF is now integrated across many of Dish’s CNFs, and Rakuten is helping Dish push the technology across its entire portfolio of applications sitting on VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amin added.

While other comparisons between the companies abound as Dish, like Rakuten before it, encounters delays in deploying a 5G network riding on an open RAN architecture, Dish stands alone as the first wireless carrier to run it entirely in the cloud on AWS.

Marc Rouanne, Dish Network’s EVP and chief network officer, underlined this point last week on the keynote stage at AWS re:Invent. 

“This is a world first, and having a true, open cloud-native network will be a game changer here in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s a first in the telecom industry and we’re doing it with AWS.”