Zurück
3.10. Rakuten: a case study in 5G-era cost optimisation
Rakuten is positioning to disrupt the mature Japanese mobile market with its preparations to launch a greenfield 4G/5G network in October 2019. As an innovative and highly successful e-commerce platform with 103 million members in Japan, Rakuten sees significant revenue synergies between telecoms and online retail.
Rakuten’s near-completion of a legacy-free, low-cost, cloud-native, fully virtualised and highly automated mobile network is what makes it very interesting.
Rakuten’s vendor ecosystem includes a mix of established players such as Cisco, Intel, NEC/Netcracker, Ciena, Fujitsu and Qualcomm, as well as challengers such as Mavenir and Altiostar, which specialise in RAN virtualisation. Nokia will provide its RRUs and some Core network elements. Notably, Ericsson, Huawei and Samsung are absent from this list.
Rakuten’s ambition to build the world’s most modern, yet one of the lowest-cost 4G/5G mobile networks is now on public record. Having first secured 4G spectrum in April 2018, Rakuten was also awarded 5G spectrum in April 2019, including 100MHz in the 3.7GHz band and 400MHz in the 28MHz bands. Rakuten then announced that its additional cumulative CapEx on its mobile network in the period to March 2025 will be JPY 200bn (US$1.9bn). US$2bn does not feel like a lot of (CapEx) money to build a greenfield mobile network in a country such as Japan with 127 million people, even with the additional OpEx bill which adds to overall network TCO. Rakuten is clearly taking full advantage of the latest networking and IT technologies – as well as the intense competition among technology vendors – unburdened by legacy infrastructure in the way so many of its peers are.
There are recent reports that Rakuten’s network rollout is slower than anticipated, and as a result its October 2019 launch may be smaller than planned]. So whether Rakuten’s highly-ambitious, pioneering approach will be a commercial success remains to be seen. Rakuten’s sought to boost its chances of success with its appointment of CTO Tareq Amin, who helped build Reliance Jio’s rapidly growing and highly disruptive Indian operation.
www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wiki/...e-network-cost-evolution/
Rakuten is positioning to disrupt the mature Japanese mobile market with its preparations to launch a greenfield 4G/5G network in October 2019. As an innovative and highly successful e-commerce platform with 103 million members in Japan, Rakuten sees significant revenue synergies between telecoms and online retail.
Rakuten’s near-completion of a legacy-free, low-cost, cloud-native, fully virtualised and highly automated mobile network is what makes it very interesting.
Rakuten’s vendor ecosystem includes a mix of established players such as Cisco, Intel, NEC/Netcracker, Ciena, Fujitsu and Qualcomm, as well as challengers such as Mavenir and Altiostar, which specialise in RAN virtualisation. Nokia will provide its RRUs and some Core network elements. Notably, Ericsson, Huawei and Samsung are absent from this list.
Rakuten’s ambition to build the world’s most modern, yet one of the lowest-cost 4G/5G mobile networks is now on public record. Having first secured 4G spectrum in April 2018, Rakuten was also awarded 5G spectrum in April 2019, including 100MHz in the 3.7GHz band and 400MHz in the 28MHz bands. Rakuten then announced that its additional cumulative CapEx on its mobile network in the period to March 2025 will be JPY 200bn (US$1.9bn). US$2bn does not feel like a lot of (CapEx) money to build a greenfield mobile network in a country such as Japan with 127 million people, even with the additional OpEx bill which adds to overall network TCO. Rakuten is clearly taking full advantage of the latest networking and IT technologies – as well as the intense competition among technology vendors – unburdened by legacy infrastructure in the way so many of its peers are.
There are recent reports that Rakuten’s network rollout is slower than anticipated, and as a result its October 2019 launch may be smaller than planned]. So whether Rakuten’s highly-ambitious, pioneering approach will be a commercial success remains to be seen. Rakuten’s sought to boost its chances of success with its appointment of CTO Tareq Amin, who helped build Reliance Jio’s rapidly growing and highly disruptive Indian operation.
www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wiki/...e-network-cost-evolution/
