Akihabara News (Tokyo) — With the addition of Rakuten Mobile in early November, all four of Japan’s mobile operators (Docomo, KDDI, SoftBank, and Rakuten) have joined the O-RAN Alliance, a worldwide community promoting open and fully interoperable radio access networks (RAN).
NTT Docomo was one of the founding members in February 2018, and the others joined not long afterward.
In basic terms, RAN are an essential part of any mobile network which communicates via radio frequencies between a core network and devices such as mobile phones and computers.
Open RAN (O-RAN) stands in contrast to the RAN operated by a handful of companies (Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson) in the sense that it doesn’t rely on the proprietary technology of a single firm but is instead a set of agreed standards, specifications, and interfaces to which multiple vendors may contribute and participate. This difference could be analogized to Apple computers, which are a closed system developed and entirely controlled in a vertical fashion by Apple, and PCs from multiple vendors that can run on Microsoft software.
Among the Japanese mobile operators, it may turn to be Rakuten, which has the advantage of building out its mobile network from scratch, which is the most aggressive in its approach. Chief Technology Officer Tareq Amin recently declared, “At Rakuten Mobile, we believe that Open RAN is the future evolution of mobile networks. As a member of the O-RAN Alliance, we will leverage the experience gained from the development of our open, virtualized network in Japan to contribute to the creation of a fully open standard for RAN for the world.”
Among the more established mobile operators, Docomo seems to be the most proactive. Senior Vice President Naoki Tani recently stated: “The widespread adoption of O-RAN-compliant products will enable Docomo to build highly flexible networks and provide 5G services that meet customer needs.”
Aside from the mobile operators, other Japanese firms have joined the alliance in hopes of becoming major suppliers of O-RAN compliant equipment. These include NEC, Fujitsu, Kyocera, Sumitomo Electric, Dengyo, and Denki Kogyo.
It should also be noted that Japan is likely to become host to a future Open Test and Integration Center (OTIC), a facility that tests and verifies that equipment produced by various vendors meets the O-RAN standards and is truly interoperational. The first of these OTIC was established in Berlin.
More broadly, many Japanese companies, as well as the government, are hoping that the O-RAN Alliance will allow Japan to play an important part in the creation of 5G networks, a race in which the country had fallen well behind competitors in China and Europe.