Economic and Technical Implications of Implementation of OpenRAN by "RAKUTEN MOBILE"

The Research paper talks about how Rakuten Mobile: a new challenger telecom operator in Japan competing with NTT DoCoMo, KDDI's au, and SoftBank, has implemented various parameters of the Open RAN technology (disaggregation of RAN hardware and software on vendor-neutral, multiple architecture options- integrated RAN with disaggregation at Software and Hardware level or a split RAN with Regional Unit(RU) and Baseband Unit (BBU), solutions carried out either on Virtual machine or containerized platform, implementation of Open interface between the nodes, Open RAN compatibility with 2G,3G,4G, and 5G deployments, and innovation through adaptation of technologies such as Machine learning, IoT or Artificial Intelligence with an unusual mix of hardware and software vendors focusing on developing a cutting-edge new network architecture in deploying the open, virtualized radio access network. The study uses the case study analysis methodology: reviews of research papers and reports, white papers, company annual reports, news reports, etc. The result analysis shows that implementing virtualized open RAN will reduce Capex and Opex, reduce less deployment time. But, for now, Rakuten mobile, though implementing open RAN, faces challenges in profit generation as the mobile network is entirely built on this new and largely unproven architecture. However, it would be a mistake to see Rakuten's challenges as a negative reflection of an open RAN at this juncture. The company affirmed its goal of becoming profitable by 2023.