Cisco sees off competition from others to land a 5G standalone contract with Rakuten, but the arrangement begs many questions.\n\nEver since it crashed Japan's telecom party in 2019, Rakuten has claimed to be using the most state-of-the-art technologies and taking automation to the max in its 4G and 5G networks. The incongruity has been its long reliance on the \"non-standalone\" (NSA) version of 5G, which hitches the 5G New Radio to the old 4G core and limits what 5G can do.\n\nRakuten's former chief technology officer and boss, Tareq Amin, now off building AI data centers for Saudi Arabia, promised in mid-2020 that Rakuten would ditch that old core, provided by Cisco, and switch to much whizzier technology from Japan's own NEC, capable of supporting 5G's more impressive standalone (SA) variant. The job would be done by late 2021, he said during a Light Reading Networking Digital Symposium. But it never was. Years later, Rakuten's deployment is still based on 5G NSA and still reliant on Cisco.\n\nBut change is suddenly afoot. In its first significant update about the mobile core network for years, the Japanese operator has today announced the selection of technology partners for a long-overdue rollout of 5G SA. And perhaps the biggest surprise is the identity of the company that will provide the essential packet core – not NEC, as originally touted by Amin, but none other than existing partner Cisco.\n\nThe US bellwether, more famous for its Internet routers and switches than anything it does in networks, has long had a vendor role in the mobile core, the control center of any network. Besides serving Rakuten, it provided the 4G core used by Vodafone in the UK, for instance. But today's VodafoneThree has migrated from that platform to a converged 4G and 5G core built by Ericsson, and Amin's previous remarks added to an impression it was losing its core network footing with the shift from 4G to 5G.\n\nThe problem for Sharad Sriwastawa, Amin's successor at the helm of Rakuten's telecom businesses, was partly that Cisco was either unable or unwilling to host its 5G core on somebody else's cloud infrastructure. This would never suit Rakuten, he told Light Reading last year, because its goal was to run all telco and IT workloads on its own Rakuten Cloud platform, which has essentially grown out of the Robin.io technology it acquired about three-and-a-half years ago. \"The way they want to do 5G core is on their core hardware, on UCS [unified computing system] – that is their strategy,\" said Sriwastawa at last year's MWC Barcelona.\n\nAfter Amin's comments about switching to NEC, Rakuten had apparently shelved any plans for a launch of 5G SA while it focused on other matters, including the buildout of more basestations to fill coverage gaps in its footprint. Yet NEC remained under consideration, as did Mavenir, a US software company. Neither was ultimately chosen to provide anything, as today's update makes clear.\n\nWhat's unclear is whether Cisco was eventually persuaded to offer a version of its 5G core that did not come attached to UCS. Rakuten had not responded to a question on this and other issues at the time of publication (evening in Japan). But there is no mention of Rakuten Cloud in the section of Rakuten's statement that talks about Cisco. And continued reliance on UCS for Cisco's packet core would obviously prevent Rakuten from having that single cloud infrastructure platform for every workload.\n\nBy contrast, Rakuten Cloud does receive an important mention when Rakuten talks about the other key winner in the 5G SA deal – Nokia. The Finnish vendor, while not contributing the packet core, is down to provide a slew of other network functions including authentication, user data management, signaling, analytics and IMS voice. All these cloud-native network functions will sit on the Rakuten Cloud platform, said Rakuten. The omission of those details from the part about Cisco implies the packet core will not.\n\nThe other vendor in the mix is F5, which has been signed up for its API security and traffic-management expertise. These technologies, however, are to be integrated with Cisco's packet core portfolio, suggesting they might also fall outside the remit of Rakuten Cloud. As in the paragraphs about Nokia, there is no reference to Rakuten Cloud in the details about F5.\n\nAnother uncertainty not addressed by today's update is the status of Red Hat in the Rakuten network. The IBM-owned company provided the OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure platform Rakuten used before its takeover of Robin.io. Among other things, Red Hat was contributing a Linux-based operating system called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Amin's plans involved switching from that OpenStack infrastructure to Robin.io and replacing RHEL with Rocky Linux, an open source alternative. Yet RHEL was still in use at Rakuten in early 2024, according to Red Hat's Ian Hood, now the company's chief technology officer.\n\nRegardless of all these vendor issues, the barrier to launching 5G SA for many operators has been a lack of spectrum they can dedicate to 5G services. The UK's BT has been able to launch thanks partly to the licenses it holds for more than 350MHz of spectrum spanning multiple frequency bands. Yet ignoring its comparatively useless millimeter wave spectrum, Rakuten holds just 86MHz of paired frequencies below 2GHz and a 100MHz unpaired block in the 3.5GHz band, which is poor for coverage. Having installed 94,000 4G and 5G basestations by the end of March, it has decided another 10,000 will be needed for coverage and capacity purposes. A widely available 5G SA service from Rakuten seems unlikely to arrive fast.

Rakuten sticks with Cisco for 5G SA in blow to NEC, Mavenir

Rakuten has selected Cisco for its 5G standalone (SA) network, defying earlier plans to switch to NEC's technology. The decision highlights ongoing reliance on Cisco's non-standalone (NSA) 5G infrastructure and raises questions about Rakuten's cloud strategy, as the company continues to prioritize its own Rakuten Cloud platform.