The risky new way of building mobile broadband networks, explained by Rakuten Mobile CEO Tareq Amin - The Verge

How Rakuten Mobile has built Japan’s fourth cellphone carrier, an ORAN network, from the ground up, and why it’s 40 percent cheaper than other networks.

In 2019, the Trump administration brokered a deal allowing T-Mobile to buy Sprint as long as it helped Dish Network stand up a new 5G network to keep the number of national wireless carriers at four and preserve competition in the mobile market. You can say a lot about that deal, but it happened. And now, in 2022, Dish’s network — which is called Project Genesis, that’s a real name — is slowly getting off the ground. And it’s built on a new kind of wireless technology called Open Radio Access Network, or ORAN. Dish’s network is only the third ORAN network in the entire world, and if ORAN works, it will radically change how the entire wireless industry operates.

I have wanted to know more about ORAN for a long time. So today, I’m talking to Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile. Rakuten Mobile is a new wireless carrier in Japan. It just launched in 2020. It’s also the world’s first ORAN network, and Tareq basically pushed this whole concept into existence.

Tareq’s big idea, an Open Radio Access Network, is to break apart the hardware and software and make it so that many more vendors can build radio access hardware that Rakuten Mobile can run its own software on. Think about it like a Mac versus a PC: a Mac is Apple hardware running Apple’s software, while a PC can come from anyone and run Windows just fine or run another operating system if you want.

That’s the promise of ORAN: that it will increase competition and lower costs for cellular base station hardware, allow for more software innovation, and generally make networks faster and more reliable because operators like Rakuten Mobile will be in tighter control of the software that runs the networks and move all that software from the hardware itself to cloud services like Amazon AWS.

Since Rakuten Mobile is making all this software that can run on open hardware, they can sell it to other people. So Tareq is also the CEO of Rakuten Symphony, which — you guessed it — is helping Dish run its network here along with another network called 1&1 in Germany.

https://www.theverge.com/23297756/5g-rakuten-mobile-ceo-oran-cloud-network-decoder

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