Rakuten looking to sell virtualized network architecture as a platform
New Japanese market entrant Rakuten Mobile, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Rakuten, has established its international headquarters in Singapore, the operator said in a release.
The new hub will serve as the company’s development center for its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) and the central hub for global sales and marketing.
“We are developing the Rakuten Communications Platform offering to be made available to telecom companies, government organizations and other enterprise customers around the world,” said Tareq Amin, Representative Director, Executive Vice President and CTO of Rakuten Mobile. “RCP offers a speedy and cost-efficient deployment of fully virtualized cloud-native network services and I’m very excited to welcome Rabih Dabboussi onboard as Rakuten Mobile’s global head of sales and marketing to lead our global expansion.”
Rakuten Mobile also plans to establish a U.S. entity in California that will serve as a hub for international business expansion in the Americas. The U.S. entity will be led by Azita Arvani, General Manager, Rakuten Mobile, Americas.
“We’ve made great progress demonstrating the capabilities of RCP to the telecoms industry,” said Arvani. “We look forward to becoming a local partner to carriers and governments in the U.S. and the Americas region as they transition to a secure, affordable and cloud-native network architecture, and as they upgrade to 5G.”
Rakuten Communications Platform is aimed at offering solutions and services for the deployment of virtualized networks at speed and low cost by telecom companies, enterprises and governments around the world.
The platform contains all the elements of the Rakuten Mobile network, including telco applications and software from multiple vendors, OSS and BSS systems handling customer billing and activation systems, in addition to edge computing and virtual network management functions.
Rakuten Mobile had recently an agreement with compatriot firm NEC to jointly develop the containerized standalone (SA) 5G core network (5GC) to be used in Rakuten Mobile’s fully virtualized cloud native 5G network.
Under the terms of the agreement, Rakuten Mobile and NEC will jointly develop the containerized SA 5G mobile core to be made available on the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP).
The two companies will collaborate to build a Japan-made 5GC, based on the 5GC software source code developed by NEC.
In May, Rakuten Mobile announced it had delay the launch of commercial 5G services due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rakuten Mobile said that the 5G service originally planned for June 2020 is expected to be delayed by approximately three months due to the impact of the pandemic on part of the company’s global supply chain.
Following the launch of its non-standalone (NSA) 5G service in 2020, Rakuten Mobile aims to launch its SA 5G service in Japan in 2021.
Rakuten Mobile also announced that the total number of applications for the Rakuten UN-LIMIT unlimited mobile carrier service plan launched on April 8, 2020, has surpassed 1 million as of June 30.
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