Rakuten Mobile case study: How to build a nationwide greenfield 4G/5G network

Rakuten Symphony worked side-by-side with Rakuten Mobile to build out its revolutionary cloud-native, software-driven greenfield 4G/5G network, all based on the Rakuten Cloud platform.  

In its five plus years of operation, this innovative network has grown to more than 11,000 base stations supporting 10 million subscribers. The low cost and flexibility of the network have been a huge advantage for Rakuten Mobile in a very competitive market like Japan.

As the main supplier of cloud-native infrastructure, Open RAN software and OSS / orchestration, Rakuten Symphony learned a lot about how to build cloud-native networks.

We recently published a case study that makes that experience available to MNOs that are building their own networks.  Titled, “Rakuten Mobile: Building nationwide greenfield 4G/5G networks in record time,” this concise document speaks to the challenges Rakuten Mobile faced, and the solutions they implemented.

It is designed to be a catalyst for what MNOs need to do to scale out cloud-native infrastructure. Here are the key elements of the cloud solution presented in the paper:

• Cloud-native containers: Using the Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform provided efficient performance and resource utilization. This technology ensured each server in the network did more work.
• Hybrid VM and containers: Rakuten Mobile originally built a 4G network using NFV. It didn’t make sense to transition all of that infrastructure to containers. The Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform supports both containers and virtual machines for extreme resource efficiency.
• Open RAN: The network supported servers, radios and other Open RAN components from a variety of vendors. The use of Rakuten Cloud-Native Orchestrator provided zero-touch life cycle management.
• OSS and Automated Orchestration: This powerful software automated day-1 and day-2 operations of the new network. It was able to provide zero-touch provisioning delivering up to 1 million method of procedures per day in servers located in thousands of sites across Japan.
• Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage: This application-aware storage is high-performance and supports stateful 5G workloads.

Download the case study now to find out more about the business and technical impacts this network had as well as the real numbers behind the growth of the network. You can download the paper here.