Rakuten Mobile and NEC this week announced that the two companies have formed a partnership to build the world's first 5G open vRAN architecture in Japan.
NEC has been selected to be the 5G network equipment provider for Rakuten Mobile's new and innovative network. Through the partnership, Rakuten and NEC will jointly develop a 3.7 GHz massive MIMO 5G antenna radio unit (RU), which will be manufactured by NEC at its facilities in Japan.
NEC said its RU are ideal for 5G conditions as they are compact, lightweight and consume a low level of power, which reduces installation and operation costs.Rakuten Mobile is currently building the world's first fully virtualized, end-to-end cloud-native mobile network. This innovative network is fully virtualized from radio access network to core and adopts 5G systems architecture from launch.
Rakuten and NEC are already working together on an end-to-end BSS/OSS solution to support the mobile network launch and subsequent operations.
Tareq Amin, CTO, Rakuten Mobile
NEC's technology and expertise will allow us to not only cost-effectively create a highly secure, high quality 5G network, but by designing and producing the antennas in the local market, we look forward to contributing to the development of the Japanese telecommunications industry and economy.
Atsuo Kawamura, EVP and President, Network Services Business Unit, NEC
NEC is delighted to contribute to Rakuten Mobile's strategy for building the world's first fully virtualized, end-to-end cloud native mobile network. Going forward, NEC aims to drive the global expansion of virtualized network architecture with Rakuten Mobile.
