Rakuten Mobile recently announced that the population coverage ratio for its 4G network has reached 96%.
Relative to the end of March 2026 (FY2025) target for “96% 4G population coverage” outlined in the 4G special base station deployment plan (1.7 GHz) approved in April 2018 by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), the mobile network operator has achieved this target approximately four years ahead of schedule.
The efficiency of the base station rollout has been dramatically enhanced by the network architecture of Rakuten Mobile’s world-first fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network. This has allowed the operator to deploy simple and compact base stations and leverage technologies such as AI to find sites for base stations and drones to carry out base station site and completion inspections.
Building from the ground up, Rakuten Mobile has expanded its network from the 23 wards of Tokyo, Osaka City and Nagoya City at the time of launch to nationwide coverage and continues to improve the quality of its service. In addition to building strong partnerships with the construction companies working on the base station buildout, the entire Rakuten Group has worked as one to secure sites for base stations, contributing to the rapid expansion of the network area.
In the Rakuten network area, customers can enjoy unlimited high-speed data. Going forward, Rakuten Mobile said it will continue to expand network coverage and increase base station density to further improve the quality of its service.
