How Rakuten Mobile overcame first-of-its-kind network challenges

Tareq Amin last month accomplished a bonafide first in the mobile industry, and he did it with a team of engineers that are largely from non-telecommunications backgrounds.

Within two years of being hired by the ecommerce giant Rakuten, the veteran wireless executive has built the world’s first fully virtualized, cloud native, open radio access network (RAN).

The journey from vision to execution wasn’t without challenges. Going into the project about 18 months ago, Amin, who serves as group EVP and chief architecture officer, was mostly worried about RAN because a fully virtualized RAN is new and “unventured territory,” he told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

“There is no practical use case of open RAN deployed at scale to achieve capacity that is equivalent to the proprietary hardware that exists in the basebands today,” Amin said.

Rakuten Mobile Snagged by Provisioning Issues

Areas that he expected to be slightly easier — operations and business support services (OSS and BSS) — turned out to be the most vexing. “This is one area I still think the industry has not evolved fast enough to a true cloud-native offering in the BSS stack,” he said

“It was completely the opposite of what I had expected. Radio’s been challenging, but it’s been a steady, very well coordinated effort by robust partners and capable technical organizations, and provisioning and billing systems posed some remarkable challenges in the early days,” Amin said.

Work on the RAN and the software that powers it has been relatively smooth for Rakuten Mobile compared to those behind-the-scenes billing and support systems. “Typical radio access software development and new releases maybe happen twice a year,” he said. “From the beginning of June 2018 til today we have north of 350 software releases, all being agile, working in a CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) manner.”

That approach paired with virtualization infrastructure has enabled Amin and his team to make changes to Rakuten Mobile’s network in minutes that typically take months on other networks.

Candid Advice for Dish Network

Those early lessons at Rakuten Mobile and others gained from his previous stint at Reliance Jio have coalesced into a series of insights that Amin is now eager to share with other operators. Amin recently spoke with Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen and his leadership team, which are preparing to assemble a similar greenfield network in the United States.

The company has vast amounts of unused spectrum and gained more, including prepaid customers, as a result of T-Mobile US’ merger with Sprint. Dish previously said it intends to activate commercial 5G service in some markets before the end of this year.

Amin’s No. 1 piece of advice is to disaggregate everything. “Never allow someone to come to you, telling you they want to sell you hardware and software. You need to be the owner of your own destiny and this disaggregation strategy needs to be looked at as a holistic end-to-end story. It starts from the radio access, it goes all the way to the IP player, it goes to the core, it goes to OSS, it goes to BSS,” he said.

“Rakuten, to my knowledge, is one of the few companies in the world today that have built its entire infrastructure on only six commoditized hardware types.” As such, Amin tells all vendors that if their applications cannot run on one of those six hardware types they “don’t have the right software architecture to be part of the journey in Rakuten Mobile.”

His experience at Reliance Jio also fostered a desire to put less emphasis on technology choice and more emphasis on the people and their respective talents that make up the organization, Amin said, explaining that he purposely decided to go after a very different mix of engineers.

“My team today, I would say 60% or more are non-telco engineers,” he said. “I went after industries that have high transaction rates into their IT systems” and engineers that aren’t afraid to build new platforms and architectures that challenge the status quo.

“Organization is a critical part of transformation in my opinion,” Amin said. “The advantage I had is not because I’m greenfield I was able to build this technology, I just had greenfield mentality. That is the biggest advantage — greenfield mentality on people that are not afraid to take calculated risks, not afraid to challenge the traditional status quo, and not afraid to really venture into unexplored territories.”

By adhering to that mind set and focusing on the makeup of the organization, Amin said “everything else becomes relatively easy.”

Network Services Platform Assembled for Expansion

With much of the foundation now set for Rakuten Mobile’s aspiration to become a fourth nationwide mobile operator in Japan, the company has its sights set on expansion outside of Japan. It hired Azita Arvani to be GM of Rakuten Mobile in the Americas, and has assembled a platform to sell packaged and customizable services to meet the needs of other operators.

“The dream that we have is to tell many of the existing telecom operators, ‘look, take two years of the journey that we had, it was not simple, it was not easy to build our organization, it was not easy to build the right skill sets. Maybe you should not repeat the same mistakes,’” Amin said.

Rakuten Cloud Platform is like an app store for telecommunications network infrastructure that enables operators to click, purchase, and deploy services in a matter of weeks. “We’re very interested to find the right partners and the right opportunity to take the Rakuten Cloud Platform and ship it as an entire telco pod that has the entire technology, including by the way new technology stacks that we have built and will be building for both OSS and BSS,” he said.

“We think it’s a compelling proposition, to take all these lessons learned in Tokyo, package it, and have a technology stack that is completely open and allow others to help us make it credible and validate its use case outside of Japan,” Amin added.

Rakuten is also making investments to aid this effort, but it’s taking a relatively tempered approach. “We don’t need to spend billions of U.S. dollars acquiring you know, I call it maybe a traditional technology software stack. But we are looking and always looking opportunistically in the areas where I believe we could make the biggest impact,” he said.

Those areas, in order of biggest potential impact, include: OSS and BSS, orchestration, cloud infrastructure, and the entire containers layer. The company has entered into an agreement to acquire a company that specializes in OSS and BSS because, as Amin describes it, that is the “heart of transformation in any operator” and the “systems that exist today are in desperate need of transformation.” He declined to name the company, but said it will be publicly announced later this month.

Rakuten Mobile Eyes Impactful Investments

Conversely, Rakuten is not interested in making investments in the application domain. “I don’t feel that Rakuten should buy a packet core company, for example. I think you need to be open. If you’re not open then we will become nothing but another proprietary locked vendor. I want to be as open as possible to anybody that wants to come and onboard their workloads and application into the platform,” Amin explained.

Other investments, such as one Rakuten made in open RAN software vendor Altiostar last year that gave it majority ownership in the company, were driven by a desire to maintain Altiostar’s independence, he said. “We wanted to completely protect the entity, protect it from losing its dream and objective to bring an alternative to radio access.”

As for the Rakuten Cloud Platform, Amin is confident that it will reach maturity in June “with key telco workloads that are 100% cloud native, completely orchestrated, are elastic, and have all the auto-healing functions enabled.”

Getting to this point hasn’t been easy, and Amin expected that going into the project, but “we have no option and no choice but to make this successful” and “we are really, really close,” he said.

―SDX Central