RAKUTEN SYMPHONY
“ That abstraction layer is through open interfaces and APIs , which allows us now to say , ‘ whether you bring a technology from this vendor or that vendor , this supplier or that supplier , as long as they ' re compliant with those standard ways of managing , monitoring , and configuring those pieces of software in the network , then you don ' t need anything in between to translate ’. And that ultimately resulted in significant agility in our network . This way , we can roll out hundreds of sites a day .”
The speed of this solution cannot be overstated : once the cell site has been constructed , it can take just “ four minutes to bring a radio site on air ” – from the time the labour team installs the radios through to connecting power and networks – because “ everything is done automatically ”.
“ That helped us improve the productivity of our operations engineers , with over 300,000 cells managed by a team of only 250 people who are powered 20 times by the Symworld platform . A network of that size in North America has probably a few thousand engineers managing it .”
Functioning in individual , virtualised layers allows for a standardised foundation that can be built upon with “ off-the-shelfsystems ” around the world – adhering , to the nth degree , to Rakuten ’ s guiding principle of openness and Dabboussi ’ s “ the future is nothing but Open RAN ” mindset .
“ The other benefit of this is the ability to automate and orchestrate , to make things faster and roll things out better ; to troubleshoot in much quicker ways , identify the issues and fix them much quicker and so on . So that was really the drive behind building the network based on software .
“ The idea to move the entire mobile architecture into a software-centric platform isn ’ t a small evolution .
It ' s a revolution ”
TAREQ AMIN CEO ,
RAKUTEN SYMPHONY
“ The aspiration is to have Rakuten Symphony become the de-facto platform for managing the whole lifecycle of a mobile network , from the idea of building a network all the way to the decommissioning , upgrade and refresh of the network , as well as everything in between that takes place ,” explains Dabboussi . technologymagazine . com 47