Rakuten Symphony’s track record as the world’s largest builder of Open RAN, along with its extensive portfolio of innovative services, constitute rare advantages in the realm of mobile network transformation, Rakuten Symphony’s Global Head of Sales has said.
Speaking on Rakuten Symphony’s live series Inside Track, Udai Kanukolanu shared with host James Dartnell his expectations for what looks to be a promising 2025 for the company. Kanukolanu also emphasised the importance of working closely with mobile network operators to tackle vast legacy complexity.
“We need to understand operator challenges at a very deep level and start conversations around how we can solve their problems,” he said. “In a highly regulated industry like telecom where systems and standards are mission-critical, failure is not an option for them.”
Kanukolanu highlighted how change must be introduced gradually and strategically in order to win operator trust and deliver reliable long-term results. “I think it's important that we're able to bring them into a controlled environment, a controlled introduction, into areas where it's probably not as mission-critical to start their transformation,” he said. “Rakuten Symphony can offer so much in that respect - how do you go through that? Where do you start? We’ve been there and done it with Rakuten Mobile.”
With average revenues per user largely remaining flat across the industry and with OTT players now claiming huge chunks of wallet share, telecom has broadly struggled to monetize mobile networks, and 5G specifically, Kanukolanu said. With data usage only set to increase, the industry now faces a conundrum when it comes to securing its economic future. However, Rakuten offers a unique global use case for the rapid and relatively low-cost deployment and operation of a mobile network, he said.
“Our technology has been unique in terms of being able to disrupt the cost factor,” he said. “There's a real intrigue in terms of how we're doing it, whether it is our ecosystem play, and how the network and the ecosystem are working together. Rakuten Group has a phenomenal network of 70+ businesses. There is so much opportunity for how we can bring some of that value to mobile network operators.”
Historically, operators have had very little control in terms of what they pay for kit and services, Kanukolanu said. Vendor diversity is critical if they will be able to drive costs down. “The more we are able to open up that network, the more we have opportunities for vendors to come in and innovate, the better it is,” he said. “However, the operators don't want to become their own systems integrators. They need guidance and expertise in that transformation. Rakuten Symphony sits “right at the heart of that in terms of being able to open up the network through open architectures, across the RAN, across the virtualization layer with OSS. The other part of it is making every layer of this network programmable and automated.
“It doesn't matter how mature an operator is - when we talk to them, they're blown away that we actually run our network with 250 people. That's unheard of. what we're doing with Rakuten Mobile is definitely resonating with operators globally. Our technology is deployed at scale and is hardened. That is a really exciting differentiator when we're talking about disrupting this industry. In terms of Open RAN, we're the most deployed company at scale – well over 60,000 sites – that’s massive.”
Kanukolanu used the live session to highlight what he believes are some of the biggest opportunities for Rakuten Symphony in 2025. “One is around the horizontal telco cloud,” he said. “Another that is really starting to emerge is around private data centers. When you look at our OSS portfolio, we see a lot of opportunity around automation. We're looking at all kinds of industries where we can take our technology. There’s no reason we can’t sell our cloud portfolio for whatever use cases there are in the market. When it comes to our OSS platform, that’s industry-agnostic.”
