Japan’s Rakuten to roll out 5G services by June 2020, CEO says
PUBLISHED THU, AUG 1 2019 2:04 AM EDT
Saheli Roy Choudhury
Japanese tech conglomerate Rakuten will roll out 5G services in June 2020, its CEO said Thursday.
Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten’s CEO and chairman, said the company does not have to create a brand new network to roll out 5G services.
“We are going to deploy what we call mobile edge computing. In Japan, we are going to have over 4,000 edge servers,” Mikitani told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal on Thursday at the Rakuten Optimism conference in Yokohama, Japan.
For its part, Rakuten plans to enter Japan’s mobile phone market in October by rolling out a new 4G-enabled network. It will compete in the country against the likes of NTT Docomo, KDDI and SoftBank.
While traditional mobile networks rely on a large amount of expensive hardware, Rakuten claims its product will be “the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network. That implies the mobile network requires fewer physical components and, therefore, it is cheaper to build, more cost-effective and can be upgraded quickly.
www.cnbc.com/2019/08/01/...une-2020-ceo-hiroshi-mikitani.html