Rakuten's Tareq Amin: Battling legacy thinking and network complexity

This is the service provider keynote featuring a conversation between Gabriel Brown, principal analyst for mobile networks and 5G at Heavy Reading, and Tareq Amin, group chief technology officer at Rakuten Mobile. The interview was streamed to an audience of thousands on April 8, during the Open RAN World Digital Conference.

During the interview, Amin discussed his ambition to build a new kind of wireless network in Tokyo and, eventually, all of Japan. He noted that the company is very happy with what they've achieved so far but doesn't shy away from the fact that "this has really, really been a complex path, to go create a new foundation for a new connectivity architecture that, frankly speaking, doesn't currently exist at this scale," Amin said.

Complexity aside, the more flexible network has allowed Rakuten to keep prices low and "we think that consumers have enormously benefited from the disruption that this technology and from the business model that Rakuten has done," he said. "I cannot imagine having this level of flexibility had we built the network on what I would consider to be a legacy platform architecture that's driven by hardware..."

Related links:

• Open RAN gains global momentum
• Rakuten Mobile clocks 'throughput' of 1.77 Gbit/s
• Rakuten's sumo-sized mobile challenge just got $2B costlier
• Rakuten: Our spectrum's the problem, not our network

— The Staff, Light Reading