At Rakuten Symphony, we’ve always believed that the next great leaps in telecom won’t come from any single company, but from collaboration across the entire ecosystem. That belief is what led us to join the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), a global community committed to accelerating innovation through openness, shared learning, and real-world outcomes.
"Joining TIP isn’t simply a symbolic gesture. It’s a practical step toward building a more open and interoperable future, one that combines the best of existing experience with the energy of new innovation."
Telecom has always been an industry built on progress, from analog to digital, from fixed line to mobile, from hardware to software. But as the complexity of networks grows, so too does the need for new ways of working together. Openness isn’t just a philosophy anymore; it’s a prerequisite for scale, efficiency, and resilience.
Joining TIP isn’t simply a symbolic gesture. It’s a practical step toward building a more open and interoperable future, one that combines the best of existing experience with the energy of new innovation.
Turning Best Practices into Shared Practices
When we look at where telecom stands today, it’s clear that many of the problems we face are not technological but structural. Operators are expected to deliver ever-increasing capacity, faster speeds, and greater reliability, all while reducing costs and managing multi-vendor environments. Vendors and system integrators, meanwhile, need more predictable frameworks for collaboration and deployment.
Through TIP, we see an opportunity to close those gaps. Our immediate engagement begins in data observability, data management, and service assurance, foundational areas that can dramatically reduce the friction of network transformation. When data is open, visible, and actionable, automation becomes simpler, AI becomes more effective, and innovation scales faster.
As Kristian Toivo, TIP’s Executive Director, said recently in our Zero-Touch Live discussion, the organization’s purpose has always been “to drive concrete use cases, show they can be implemented, and prove they work.” That practical, commercially grounded approach is exactly why we joined. It’s not about white papers, it’s about results.
Learning from Proven Success
In Japan, Rakuten Mobile demonstrated that an open, cloud-native, AI-first network is not only viable but commercially successful. We’ve taken that experience, from the tools, architectures, and operational learnings, and made them available globally through Rakuten Symphony. But our goal isn’t to replicate one model everywhere. It’s to industrialize what works, so others can adapt it to their environments.
"The good news is that this collaboration is already happening, and it’s growing."
That’s why collaboration matters. TIP’s project groups, from optical transport to Open RAN to OpenWiFi, are where diverse teams come together to build, test, and validate solutions that deliver measurable benefits. These aren’t academic exercises, they lead to products and deployments that operators can trust and use.
For example, in optical transport, TIP has already proven how disaggregated systems and open interfaces can meet the massive new demands created by AI workloads. These are innovations that matter, not because they’re flashy, but because they make networks more capable, affordable, and adaptable.
The Case for Openness
It’s easy to talk about “openness” as a buzzword. But in telecom, openness means three things:
We’ve seen what happens when collaboration scales. The cost per gigabyte has dropped dramatically. New forms of connectivity, from Open RAN to OpenWiFi, are becoming viable at commercial levels. And in every case, shared frameworks have accelerated what used to take years down to months.
But there’s still much more to do. To truly achieve autonomous, programmable networks, we need collective alignment on data, APIs, and operational models. We need to make openness the default, not the exception.
Join Us at Fyuz
The good news is that this collaboration is already happening, and it’s growing. Next week, we’ll join the global TIP community at Fyuz 2025 in Dublin (November 3–5 to continue these conversations in person.
Fyuz isn’t just another industry conference. It’s where ideas become roadmaps and partnerships take shape. It’s where engineers, operators, and innovators sit together and ask: What can we build together next?
If you’re an operator, vendor, or developer looking to make your networks more efficient and intelligent — or simply curious about how open collaboration can deliver real commercial outcomes — I invite you to join us there.
Let’s move from theory to practice. Let’s align what’s already working with what’s coming next. And let’s make openness not just an aspiration, but the foundation for how our industry moves forward.
See you in Dublin.
