“We see Open RAN as being the predominant technology in future of telecoms industry” – Rakuten Symphony
MARK FORKER 20 HOURS AGO
Rakuten Symphony are positioning themselves to be the ‘go-to’ player for Open RAN – and the recent launch of their Open RAN Customer Experience Centre in the United Kingdom has been labelled as a ‘major step forward’ by industry analysts.
In a candid and in-depth discussion with CNME, Karaiskos acknowledged that historically, the radio access network space has been dominated by a very small number of vendors, but he believes Rakuten Symphony are disrupting the status quo, especially when it comes to Open RAN.
“Our UK and European customer base is growing as the adoption of Open RAN and need for operational automation increases. My technology experience has been around building networks, cloud, and building the infrastructure around data centres and putting fibre in the ground.”
Karaiskos explained the process behind Rakuten opening their experience centre in the UK, and expressed his belief that it will serve as a great hub for talent and innovation.
“Both the UK and Japanese governments really see Open RAN as being the predominant technology for the future development of the telecoms industry. They were very impressed by its security and scalability – and that’s very important for industry players to both see and hear, and will only serve to accelerate adoption of Open RAN,” said Karaiskos.
Karaiskos emphasised the importance of dispelling some of the myths about Open RAN, and said that Rakuten Symphony are in a good place to do just that.
Karaiskos also highlighted the transformative impact automation can have for telecommunication operators, drawing upon the success of Rakuten Mobile, Japan’s fourth mobile network operator. Rakuten Mobile owns the largest Open RAN virtualised cloud deployment in the world, with just under 400,000 sites currently in operation and almost 100% coverage.
“Operators are very open in terms of looking at what we are doing here because they see the benefits that automation can bring for them. We know that in a typical telecoms’ estate automation hasn’t featured particularly heavily. The example we often use is the network size of Rakuten Mobile. The national network coverage of Japan is just under 100%, a network of that size from my experience of working with European operators you’re going to need a huge team of anywhere between 6,000-9,000 people in terms of field services, operational staff, SOC and NOC to manage that the network. However, at Rakuten Mobile that network is being operated by 250 people because of the automation. Operators need to look at how they can optimise and automate their operations to improve scale, commercial and energy efficiency Karaiskos said.
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