Behind Rakuten’s potential upending of network engineering and operations
Few details about how Rakuten plans to deliver and support mobile services have been published – until now. Here’s what the company's CTO, Tareq Amin, had to say at our recent Digital Transformation World event.
31 May 2019
Behind Rakuten’s potential upending of network engineering and operations
The mobile communications industry is just becoming familiar with Japanese mobile and internet company Rakuten and its claims to be building the world’s first end-to-end cloud native architecture at significantly lower cost than traditional mobile networks. Few details about how the company plans to deliver and support mobile services have been published – until now. Here’s what Rakuten CTO Tareq Amin had to say at our recent Digital Transformation World event.
Rakuten is manifesting all the radical change that experts say needs to be made in telecom in order to be agile, innovative and competitive in the digital age: virtualization, mobile edge computing, closed-loop automation, microservices, continuous innovation/continuous development and delivery (CI/CD) and more. When the company official launches its LTE service in October, the industry will begin to assess the merits of a cloud-native strategy and determine how quickly they must follow.
The first tradition Rakuten throws out the window is identifying customers by their mobile phone numbers. As its core business is not networking (Amin often says, “We are not a telecom company; we are a global internet innovation company”), Rakuten instead assigns membership IDs for users of its core rewards platform. Mobile LTE is just another service it provides to members and another channel to its rewards and cashback platforms. (Rakuten acquired San Francisco-based cashback company, eBates in 2014 for approximately $1 billion.) Rakuten has 128 million customers in japan, and 105 million of them are in the membership program.
Because of the partner-driven businesses of loyalty rewards and cashback, Rakuten needs an advanced partnership management and reconciliation solutions. For this, the company turned to Netcracker and its digital business support system (BSS) platform.
Rakuten is manifesting all the radical change that experts say needs to be made in telecom in order to be agile, innovative and competitive in the digital age: virtualization, mobile edge computing, closed-loop automation, microservices, continuous innovation/continuous development and delivery (CI/CD) and more. When the company official launches its LTE service in October, the industry will begin to assess the merits of a cloud-native strategy and determine how quickly they must follow.
The first tradition Rakuten throws out the window is identifying customers by their mobile phone numbers. As its core business is not networking (Amin often says, “We are not a telecom company; we are a global internet innovation company”), Rakuten instead assigns membership IDs for users of its core rewards platform. Mobile LTE is just another service it provides to members and another channel to its rewards and cashback platforms. (Rakuten acquired San Francisco-based cashback company, eBates in 2014 for approximately $1 billion.) Rakuten has 128 million customers in japan, and 105 million of them are in the membership program.
Because of the partner-driven businesses of loyalty rewards and cashback, Rakuten needs an advanced partnership management and reconciliation solutions. For this, the company turned to Netcracker and its digital business support system (BSS) platform.
Rakuten claims that with this BSS, the company can reduce the time to activate new customers from two to three hours to just 10 minutes.
The next tradition ejected by Rakuten was the procurement process. The request for proposal (RFP) process had to go, Amin said. This was quickly followed by any requirements for custom hardware.
Rakuten also has dispensed with physical components in its radio access network (RAN), traditional OSS, mediation, field techs and maintenance windows.
Live since May 4, but not officially launched, Rakuten’s RAN is completely virtual.
Industry wide 60% of capital expense is in the RAN, according to Amin. He added that deploying more legacy infrastructure will always result in legacy results and that tightly coupled hardware and software will never get companies the results they are looking for.
The cost of the RAN is largely responsible for the difficulty CSPs have in making the business case for 5G, Amin said. Rakuten selected Nokia to provide full turnkey services for planning, managing, deploying and integrating cloud RAN, using Nokia’s AirGile cloud-native core network technology and several Nokia software functions, including IP Multimedia Subsystem, shared data layer, session border controller, and approximately 25 cloud-based virtual network functions.
Something else Rakuten tries to dispense with is the notion that a cloud architecture supported by a microservices-based OSS/BSS is somehow less resilient that traditional ‘telco grade’ networks. Many webscale companies have better resiliency that CSPs, Amin said, adding that a software code base broken into hundreds of containers is inherently more resilient and reliable than tightly coupled hardware and software.
Using Netflix as an example, Amin said cloud-based webscale companies can do thousands of software upgrades per day without concerning themselves with maintenance windows. Telecom cannot do the same.
Having a cloud-native, virtual architecture will allow Rakuten to dispense with many of the metrics CSPs typically monitor to manage performance, such as utilization, forecasting, trending and more, as well as the people who do the monitoring. Instead, the company has one metric based on a single threshold: utilization. If utilization reaches 70%, the cloud automatically spins up another virtual machine (VM).
The next tradition ejected by Rakuten was the procurement process. The request for proposal (RFP) process had to go, Amin said. This was quickly followed by any requirements for custom hardware.
“Life would have been easier for me had I selected a more traditional way of deploying networks, but that would not fit well with our ecosystem and culture, which is what we are all about,” Amin said.
Rakuten also has dispensed with physical components in its radio access network (RAN), traditional OSS, mediation, field techs and maintenance windows.
Taking virtualization to heart
Live since May 4, but not officially launched, Rakuten’s RAN is completely virtual.
“We took every component in the network and made it software,” Amin said. “I was told the RAN would never be virtualized. In Japan it is. We finished everything in eight months. We did not have a data center, any infrastructure, no backbone, nothing. Today we are live.”
Industry wide 60% of capital expense is in the RAN, according to Amin. He added that deploying more legacy infrastructure will always result in legacy results and that tightly coupled hardware and software will never get companies the results they are looking for.
The cost of the RAN is largely responsible for the difficulty CSPs have in making the business case for 5G, Amin said. Rakuten selected Nokia to provide full turnkey services for planning, managing, deploying and integrating cloud RAN, using Nokia’s AirGile cloud-native core network technology and several Nokia software functions, including IP Multimedia Subsystem, shared data layer, session border controller, and approximately 25 cloud-based virtual network functions.
5G is just introducing another VM
Something else Rakuten tries to dispense with is the notion that a cloud architecture supported by a microservices-based OSS/BSS is somehow less resilient that traditional ‘telco grade’ networks. Many webscale companies have better resiliency that CSPs, Amin said, adding that a software code base broken into hundreds of containers is inherently more resilient and reliable than tightly coupled hardware and software.
A cloud architecture is what will allow Rakuten to deploy 40,000 LTE eNodeB’s without employing more than 100 operations support personnel.
Using Netflix as an example, Amin said cloud-based webscale companies can do thousands of software upgrades per day without concerning themselves with maintenance windows. Telecom cannot do the same.
Having a cloud-native, virtual architecture will allow Rakuten to dispense with many of the metrics CSPs typically monitor to manage performance, such as utilization, forecasting, trending and more, as well as the people who do the monitoring. Instead, the company has one metric based on a single threshold: utilization. If utilization reaches 70%, the cloud automatically spins up another virtual machine (VM).
An OSS by any other name
Rakuten’s operations support is designed to be largely automated, and Amin thinks the term OSS is unworthy of the platform the company is putting together. Traditional functions within OSS remain the same – traditional FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security) as well as inventory, RF planning, work order management, analytics and more. However, Rakuten means to eliminate the mediation layer by relying on open adapters, a single Hadoop big data architecture leveraging AI and machine learning built into a platform that is completely closed loop and ties all these OSS functions as well as IT functions together. Rakuten believes this will reduce fragmentation and support the efficient management of its cloud platform.
The Rakuten network and support infrastructures have been tested, but they have yet to be put to the test. The real test comes in late 2019, 2020 and 2021 when 5G is added to the mix of technologies and the merits of closed-loop automation are judged.
Watch the video below for the full interview:
