Rakuten Rolling Out Revolutionary 5G Mobile Network In Japan

Building World’s First Fully Virtualized Cloud-Native Network

With our new mobile network, all these network services are directly connected to the internet,” says Rakuten founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani. “Our firewall is probably much stronger than any other hardware-dependent mobile network. It is a pretty wrong idea that hardware is stronger in terms of security than software. It’s kind of a syndrome.”

Rakuten is in taking a revolutionary approach to building out Japan’s fourth major mobile. Network. “The journey that we are embarking on in Japan will enable a complete transformation in the telecom infrastructure buildout,” explains Rakuten Mobile Network Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Tareq Amin. “We are building the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized cloud-native network.” At the Rakuten Technology Conference, last October, Amin said that they are deploying a very different architecture and leveraging Rakuten IT skills.

“The majority of the telecommunication companies in the world have been on this journey of transformation. And yet I would argue that very little progress has happened to deploy a true end-to-end cloud-native network,” says Amin. “In fact, there is not a single telco in the world that has moved all of its workloads to the cloud. I think Rakuten is going to be the only company in the world that’s going to enable this.”

Rakuten Rolling Out Revolutionary 5G Mobile Network In Japan

We are rolling out our 4G network before we launch 5G. We are going to deploy what we call mobile edge computing in Japan. We are going to have over 4,000 edge servers all over Japan. Therefore, we do not have to create a new network for 5G. What we need to do is modify our edge servers a little bit. Our core network throughput is really fast. What we have to do is just add a 5G antenna, which we already have developed together with Qualcomm as well as NEC. We will be rolling out 5G in June 2020.

As 5G rolls out consumers will understand the benefits. The key is an edge computing. There is a very low latency between your device and edge. It’s just a millisecond latency, so it’s almost like you have artificial intelligence. You hold your own artificial intelligence in your hand. Definitely, the speed is going to be much faster, maybe 1,000 times faster than 4G. Of course, latency is going to be much shorter. So autonomous driving and other autonomous applications are going to be really becoming true.