楽天が日本でグリーンフィールド無線ネットワークを構築

楽天には多くのベンダーが取り組んでいます。主要ベンダーの中には、Intel、Quanta、Altiostar、Ciscoなどがあります。Japanese e-commence giant Rakuten is building a new mobile network to compete against NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank in Japan. And the company has enlisted a heavy-hitter roster of vendors to help it build what it dubs “the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network." Its vendor partners include Cisco, Nokia, Altiostar, Intel, Red Hat, OKI, Fujitsu, Ciena, NEC/Netcracker, Qualcomm, Mavenir, Quanta Cloud Technology, Sercomm, Tech Mahindra, Allot, Innoeye, and Viavi. The Rakuten Mobile Network will initially be a 4G LTE network with macro and small cells as well as Wi-Fi. Construction of a radio antenna network is underway and on track for an October 2019 launch in Japan. The company says it will evolve to 5G in early 2020, subject to government licensing approval. In addition to mobile data and voice, the network will eventually deliver 5G fixed wireless access and narrowband IoT. The company says the network will be fully virtualized from the radio access network (RAN) to the core, with end-to-end automation for both network functions and services. The first end-to-end, real-world tests of the new network were conducted Feb. 3 on the data network. Rakuten Mobile Network executives, team members and partners used the new data network to conduct voice and video calls over the Viber messaging platform. The tests are now expanding to engage up to 10,000 friendly users. The next stage of the project will include testing of the voice network. Rakuten provided some details about the technical aspects of its new network: A lot of vendors are working with Rakuten, and FierceWireless will be checking in with them soon to find out how they’re involved. But Intel issued a statement saying the Rakuten network vRAN runs on Intel Xeon processor-based servers from Quanta, supporting radio access technology from Altiostar and core network software from Cisco. Rakuten is best known as an e-commerce company with an existing customer base of over 100 million registered members. “We are very excited to launch a mobile network in Japan that is set to become the first choice of consumers and change global standards in telecommunications,” said Mickey Mikitani, president and CEO of Rakuten, in a prepared statement. “With automation and virtualization, Rakuten is redefining how mobile networks are designed and how services can be consumed.”