Our modern world wouldn’t be what it is without the telecom industry. As Kunal mentioned, what’s surprising is that there really hasn’t been that much change in the industry in 40 years. That’s despite how vital the industry is. Cutting-edge, software-driven technologies have been adopted by the rest of the world and delivered incredible benefits from a sustainability, end-user and business perspective... but for some reason, not in telecom.
We could speculate why that might be but the fact of the matter is that Rakuten Symphony was born out of the desire to democratize the industry and inject innovation into its very heart – to shake things up and show the world that there is a better way to build connectivity.
Mobile as a Software is the mindset behind the shakeup. It’s about driving software into the heart of the telecom industry and empowering market players with top-tier Open RAN (coming up next!), cloud and automation.
There was once a time when SIM cards for mobile phones were physically built into the phones themselves. You couldn’t take them out. This meant that you were locked into a single network provider (i.e. carrier) for as long as you had that particular phone.
As technology advanced, these built-in SIM cards were separated from the phone and made into small physical cards that you could swap in and out. Now, to your heart’s desire, you could easily change carriers and phone plans to suit your needs (democratization). More recently, these physical SIM cards are being turned into completely virtual e-SIMs (virtualization). Meaning you can change mobile carriers without ever needing a physical SIM
What the talented teams at Rakuten Symphony are doing is bringing this sort of democratization and virtualization to the telecom industry as a whole: changing the way telecom networks are built from the ground up through Open RAN technologies.
Remember the issue your amazing new WOMBAT network faced when it came to sourcing and layering all the different unit layers? And the high prices and lack of vendor choices?
Well, Rakuten Symphony’s ground-breaking Open Radio Access Network (RAN) technologies allow operators to mix and match components from different vendors to get the best of what you need. In addition, this “openness” means new entrants can enter the industry, generating more competition and in turn, more innovation.
Greater competition has one other big benefit. And that’s bringing down costs. Way down. Vendors can’t afford to charge exorbitant high prices if people have cheaper, better alternatives. The more you can save on building your network, the more you’ll be able to bring the price of the WOMBAT network down for all your customers and the more money you’ll have left to invest in other more crucial areas.
This should be a no-brainer. But it’s taken the best contrarian thinkers and technical experts from around the world to tackle the hard questions and make Open RAN a reality. The first proper use case of it was actually Rakuten Mobile, the Mobile Network Operator (MNO) that sparked the formation of Rakuten Symphony!
We’ve already touched on the important role that cloud plays in telecoms. And you’ll remember that Kunal talked about how edge computing is still a relatively unexplored frontier for the telecom industry. Well, Rakuten Symphony has an entire business unit dedicated to this space. Whatever the network needs are, whether it’s for a telecom company, government or enterprise, this team has created edge cloud technologies that deliver incredible speed, security and scalability – and all on an open-source system called Kubernetes. See our Jargon Dictionary below to get the definition of this!
There’s an entire galaxy’s worth of cloud, edge computing and open-source system-related topics that we could dive into here. Stateful edge, virtual networking, app-awareness... It’s safe to say our teams are working on some pretty cool stuff across all of these areas and more. And they’re picking up quite a few awards along the way too. We’d love to tell you more but we’ll keep some of that for after you’ve joined us.
Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are quickly becoming mainstays in any business’s day-to-day operations. Once automation is implemented and proven to work, why waste valuable human time and energy in doing it over and over again? Plus, the most common errors in complex technical operations are human, so why risk the personal touch in tasks that don’t particularly need it? We haven’t quite got to a place where machines can completely do all of our work for us but we have gotten to a place where they can do a lot of the heavy lifting – meaning we humans can do more creative, value-add work.
Over chapters 1 and 2, we walked through all the different elements of building, maintaining and enhancing a telecom network. Can you imagine if at every turn, on the large scale that telecom companies operate, a human had to carry out all the necessary tasks? It would take. Forever. Thankfully, we’re working towards something way beyond that at Rakuten Symphony.
The Mobile as a Software™ mindset that our teams hold leads to pioneering edge automation tools and AI applications in the world of telecoms. From modelling potential new cell tower sites to watching a live network for outages, responding to customer queries to updating remote devices, the automation and AI capabilities our teams continue to develop minimize errors, elevate safety, increase efficiency, and ultimately, have the potential to empower all of the people working and living in this world.
