Rakuten Mobile Joins O-RAN ALLIANCE

Tokyo, November 4, 2020 – Rakuten Mobile, Inc. today announced that it has joined the O-RAN ALLIANCE, a world-wide community promoting open, fully interoperable radio access networks (RAN). In addition, Tareq Amin, Representative Director, Executive Vice President and CTO of Rakuten Mobile, was today appointed as a member of the board of directors of the O-RAN ALLIANCE.

The O-RAN ALLIANCE is a world-wide community of over 200 operators, vendors, research and academic institutions operating in the RAN industry. Founded in February 2018 and established as a German entity in August 2018, the organization’s mission is to re-shape the industry towards more intelligent, open, virtualized and fully interoperable mobile networks. By defining O-RAN architecture and specifications, the O-RAN ALLIANCE aims to enable an open, interoperable supply chain ecosystem in full support of and complimentary to standards promoted by 3GPP and other industry standards organizations.

Rakuten Mobile has built the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized, cloud native mobile network^*1. The network is a real-world implementation of OpenRAN, utilizing a multi-vendor approach incorporating virtualization technologies. The architecture also makes it possible to smoothly transition to an O-RAN standard-compliant RAN mainly through a software upgrade.

“At Rakuten Mobile, we believe that OpenRAN is the future evolution of mobile networks,” said Tareq Amin, Representative Director, Executive Vice President and CTO of Rakuten Mobile. “As a member of the O-RAN ALLIANCE, we will leverage the experience gained from the development of our open, virtualized network in Japan to contribute to the creation of a fully open standard for RAN for the world.”

As a member of the O-RAN ALLIANCE, Rakuten Mobile will contribute to the technical development of innovative, open and intelligent RAN.

*1 For a large scale commercial mobile network (as of October 1, 2019). Research: Stella Associa