Rakuten Mobile working like crazy to deploy 5G next month

Rakuten Mobile expects to overcome the impacts of the global pandemic, insofar as it relates to its 5G network deployment, much quicker than the technological challenges it faced during the last year.

The greenfield operator’s 4G LTE network recently went live about six months behind schedule, but it remains on target to deploy 5G next month, according to Tareq Amin, group EVP and chief architecture officer at Rakuten Mobile.

“In general, we are not seeing any side effects of the epidemic,” he told SDxCentral in a phone interview. “I also don’t see an impact on our 5G construction. We might be slowed down on the number of base stations that we are able to construct, but I don’t think it’s going to be materialistic.”

The company might encounter a delay up to two weeks on software, but the hardware is built and ready to deploy, Amin said. That 5G hardware, which was designed and manufactured in partnership with NEC and Intel in Japan, includes radios for sub-6 GHz and millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum.

“If we had built a network, the likes of any network that gets deployed, I think this epidemic would have completely devastated Rakuten’s mobile plans,” he said. “5G buildout for Rakuten starts with components and component vendor selection, reference design architecture, hardware manufacturing, complete from the ground up software development, system integration, and testing.”

Rakuten Mobile does not have much room for delays. Its established rivals in Japan – NTT Docomo, KDDI, and SoftBank – are rapidly building out their nascent 5G networks.

Rakuten Mobile Assesses Potential Software Delays

While the COVID-19 crisis hasn’t impacted productivity on the technical side because code can be written and seeded remotely, it has impacted the work and personal life balance for Amin and his colleagues, he said. “We are working like crazy. I think working from home … it just feels to me personally that there is no more time during the day to do anything.”

About 29 different organizations are dialing in daily from around the world to load, maintain, and upgrade the software leading up to the 5G launch, Amin said.

Meanwhile, Rakuten Mobile is assessing some potential issues related to Altiostar’s software because that vendor’s engineering team is primarily located in India where strict measures have made it impossible for staff to access their labs. Rakuten has provided Altiostar’s team with an instance into its labs in Japan to help resolve those issues.

Altiostar, which is majority owned by Rakuten Mobile, is providing its open RAN platform to the carrier’s deployment.

Amin’s experience throughout this journey has also buoyed his belief in open radio access networks (RAN), particularly as a global pandemic disrupts traditional norms. “I believe that being open addresses security, addresses scalability, addresses total cost of ownership, and I am personally a big supporter of the future and the vision of how we need to work on migrating to open RAN,” he said.

It won’t be easy for the leading RAN vendors to shift from selling proprietary hardware and software to a more open and software-centric approach, according to Amin. “I still think that there’s a lot of pondering that needs to happen before they commit to a strategy of being open and then committed to this journey.” But, he added, “if you look at what’s happening in Telefónica, Vodafone, AT&T, and also Dish now, I feel this is just an opportunity, an opportunistic time to really show and push forward on such a standard.”

―SDX Central