Altiostar and Rakuten Mobile on Thursday announced a number of performance and scalability achievements for the Rakuten Mobile 4G and 5G Open RAN deployments, highlighted with innovation around virtualization, automation and performance.
In September 2020, only five months after the initial launch, Rakuten Mobile was the first operator to launch a commercial-scale, cloud-native 5G network, leveraging Altiostar’s open virtualized radio access network (Open vRAN) solution. Because baseband functions are deployed as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), it has been possible for Rakuten Mobile to automate various operational tasks such as new cell site integration (auto-commissioning), as well as fault detection and automated recovery from failures (self-healing), further minimizing its Opex. As an example, due to the automation of its network, Rakuten Mobile has stated it can provision a new 5G cell site in just four minutes and a 4G site in eight minutes.
The 5G network, leveraging advanced massive MIMO and millimeter wave (mmWave) radios, covers both sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequency bands. Altiostar worked closely with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Airspan, and Rakuten Mobile on innovation in mmWave radios based on Qualcomm 5G RAN platforms, with the disaggregation of hardware and software designed to deliver a much better quality of experience, allowing the network to dynamically reallocate resources on the fly.
Altiostar collaborated with NEC and Rakuten Mobile to introduce to the 5G network the sub-6 GHz massive MIMO radios, which were validated as compliant with O-RAN specifications during an O-RAN Alliance Plugfest held in September 2020 in India.
The 5G network has demonstrated impressive performance for end users, with throughput of 1.77 Gbps. This compares favorably to data from a Ookla, which detailed speed test results for Japan in Q3 2020, where the fastest 10% of users realized an average download speed of 719.42 Mbps.
Tareq Amin, Representative Director, EVP and CTO at Rakuten Mobile
The performance and stability of the 5G network shows that a cloud-native framework and web-scale architecture can compete with a traditional RAN approach and provide new levels of automation to the network.
Ashraf Dahod, CEO of Altiostar
The Altiostar container-based solution allows Rakuten Mobile to quickly provision new sites and turn up service for a customer in record time.
