Tag: Rakuten

March 6, 2024

With all the talk of AI-native telcos, it’s important to remember that to be AI-native, first you have to be cloud-native. What does that mean? It means there are very few operators that are cloud-native, so their perspective on being […]

March 30, 2023

Rakuten Mobile, Rakuten Symphony and Rakuten Symphony UK officially opened the Rakuten Open RAN (O-RAN) customer experience center in the United Kingdom. The new facility is the result of international cooperation, with Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) […]

February 15, 2023

Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile said its 4G network reached 98% of the country’s population as of the end of the most recent quarter. The telco said it had expected to reach a population coverage of 99% with its 4G in […]

November 18, 2022

Rakuten Mobile announced this week that it has obtained preliminary licenses from Japanese regulators to begin testing direct-to-mobile satellite communication. The company said it is working with satellite maker AST SpaceMobile and its recently launched BlueWalker 3 satellite to provide […]

November 14, 2022

Japanese mobile operator Rakuten Mobile aims to start using spectrum in the so-called platinum band (800/900 MHz) in March 2024 to provide mobile telephony services in the country, the telco’s CEO Tareq Amin recently told a conference call with investors. […]

November 4, 2022

The world of telecoms is, among many other things, an exercise in developing and implementing technologies that have been standardized via a regimented, consensus-driven process. A reductive example—without standards, a handset sold into the U.S. market may not function on […]

August 25, 2022

Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile announced the opening of a lab in which the telco says it utilizes all the technologies and experiences it has gained through the deployment of its Open vRAN network in Japan. In a release, Rakuten Mobile […]

August 2, 2022

While there are distinctions between Open RAN, open virtualized RAN, cloud RAN and further sub-combinations of those architectures, these new approaches to building the radio access network are making inroads in the real world, according to Stefan Pongratz, vice president […]

July 16, 2021

Recently, Open RAN developers have taken various actions to demonstrate the feasibility and accelerated progress of open and unbundled mobile network specifications. The race to Open RAN will be a marathon, not a sprint, as the architecture is yet to […]

May 22, 2020

Earlier this month the Open RAN Policy Coalition launched with a number of open RAN vendors, naturally, and operator members, including AT&T, DISH, NTT, Telefonica, Verizon and Vodafone. None of the big three RAN vendors–Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, were among […]

June 10, 2019

Japanese carrier Rakuten Mobile and compatriot company NEC announced that they have formed a partnership to build what it claims to be the world’s first 5G open vRAN architecture in Japan. NEC has been selected to be the network equipment […]

March 27, 2019

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power COmpany) Power Grid, Incorporated, KDDI CORPORATION, SoftBank Corp. and Rakuten Mobile Network, Inc. announced that the four companies have reached an agreement to collaborate on trials of base station site and equipment sharing utilizing TEPCO PG’s […]

February 14, 2019

Intel has confirmed that it will provide technology to Japanese e-commerce and internet services provider Rakuten for a new cloud-native network. Intel said in a statement that the new network will be fully virtualized from radio access network (RAN) to […]

November 2, 2018

Japanese telecom operator NTT DoCoMo plans to launch pre-commercial 5G services in September 2019, the carrier’s president and CEO, Kazuhiro Yoshizawa, said during a conference call with investors and analysts. Yoshizawa also said that the company aims to launch commercial […]