Rakuten using IT experience to disrupt mobile industry

areq Amin, Rakuten CTO, told Mobile World Daily before his appearance today in a conference session that the company’s biggest advantage is “our people and work culture. We are not a telecommunications company – we are an IT company with highly skilled IT engineers”.

He explained its IT division understood and mastered virtualisation years ago and is taking the same concept to a telco, which has been talked about but never realised. Rakuten’s radio access will be completely virtualised and running as VNF (virtual network functions) on a horizontal private cloud, which “is a very big thing in the industry as it will enables us to deploy new services rapidly”.

The company, which received approval to become the fourth major mobile player in April 2018, will be the first new mobile network operator to launch in Japan in more than a decade, he said.

Construction of its network began in August 2018 and it plans to launch mobile services in October 2019.

“We aim to not only disrupt Japan’s telco industry, we want to revolutionise mobile networks worldwide,” Amin said.

Rakuten, which already offers MVNO services in Japan using KDDI’s network, forged a strategic partnership with the operator, which Amin said extends beyond roaming coverage. Rakuten will provide its payment platforms Rakuten Pay and logistics services to KDDI starting in April this year. KDDI will provide it with roaming services until the end of March 2026.