There is a lot of hype around Open RAN right now, largely stoked by vendors shouting about the many benefits it delivers.

In Rakuten Symphony’s estimation, are operators buying the hype?

Hype is not productive in any context. Neither is saying that something isn’t ready or it’s not possible to do.

Business Results and Outcomes

We have to start talking about the business results and the business outcomes we want to achieve to bring us to parity with other modern digital service providers if we want to maintain relevance and an ability to react in the market. This conversation is missing. We are caught in a back-and-forth that doesn’t allow us to educate ourselves on what is possible.

Incredibly Hard Journey

We at Rakuten Symphony have been created to share what we understand and have learned from Rakuten Mobile for and to the benefit of the rest of the industry. And let me be clear, the journey that Rakuten Mobile has been on has been the Rakuten Mobile journey. Each journey will be unique for each operator. Technology has been standardized, business has not. And each journey is hard.

New way to solve different problems

The journey of everybody is going to be their own journey. So if you choose to implement densification of a 4G network and want to use Open RAN because of real estate challenges for that densification, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the replacement if you have to swap out coverage from a vendor that is no longer available for you to use.

Let’s talk about how to do that in a new way. So let’s break the conversation down into different problems that we need to solve and identify whether we can solve those in new, different ways with different outcomes.

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Winner โ€“ Private Network Startups – Niral Networks, deploys private 5G and Edge AI network at GMRโ€™s energy facility which faced critical connectivity and safety challenges. This air-gapped, industrial-grade solution supports plant automation, AI surveillance, and drone operations, offering high throughput, low latency, and centralized management across multiple sites.
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In a detailed conversation with Rakuten Symphonyโ€™s Geoff Hollingworth, this article explores how Rakuten Mobileโ€™s Open RAN rollout defied industry skepticism and set a new bar for telecom transformation. With over 275,000 cells deployed and just 250 staff, Rakutenโ€™s software-centric model shows how cloud-native, virtualized networks can scaleโ€”offering key lessons for both greenfield and brownfield operators.

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