Beginning in 2018, Rakuten Mobile, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Rakuten Group, started deploying a greenfield Open RAN network. Since then, Rakuten Group has also spun off hardware/software and consultancy vendor Rakuten Symphony to sell its technology stack and approach to operationalizing an Open RAN network. In the recent Open RAN Global Forum, available on demand, Rakuten Symphony Chief Business Officer Rabih Dabboussi reflected on the why and how of the approach in Japan, and what he sees driving adoption of Open RAN in the larger brownfield network market.
