Japan's Rakuten Mobile to Use Cisco's Routing tech for 5G, IoT Services

Rakuten Mobile said on Friday that it has plans to use new routing technologies from Cisco. The Japanese telco said that the partnership will allow it to expand its capacity to support 5G and IoT.

Rakuten Mobile to Partner with Cisco for 5G

The Japanese telco became the first operator to deploy an Open RAN network. Open RAN, the tech that uses software to run network operations on the cloud, has fast gained popularity among telcos. This technology also allows the telcos to reduce operations costs.

What's more, with Open RAN, the telcos don't have to deploy as many physical pieces of equipment. That's because cloud networking handles most of the grunt work in Open RAN, resulting in less reliance on physical equipment.

Rakuten said that it aims to use the Cisco's cloud solutions to deploy the network faster. The cloud networking solutions will also allow for a network that has less latency, and is more energy-efficiency. Notably, the Japanese telco has 4 million subscribers. In a phone call, Rakuten CTO Tareq Amin, told analysts, "we are going big into enterprise now, in a very elegant cost-efficient manner, without having to incur cost addition".

Open RAN has many supporters across the world. In the US, Dish Network has started work to build a 5G network on Open RAN solutions. To that extent, Dish has joined hands with Nokia and AWS to deploy its network in public cloud. Dish's deployment is an industry-first - no other telco has deployed a network in public cloud before. Further, in India, Open RAN advocates include Bharti Airtel, India's second largest telco.