Rakuten Mobile says it has achieved 96% population coverage for its 4G service in Japan. It has deployed more than 37,000 outdoor 4G base stations in all 47 prefectures in the country.
The greenfield mobile operator had hoped to achieve this goal by summer of 2021. Still, the milestone is quite an accomplishment.
The company said the contributions of its RAN Integration Department were a huge help in speeding the deployment of base stations. It leveraged the fully-virtualized nature of Rakuten Mobile’s network to automate a large part of the base station implementation process.
The RAN Integration team commissioned both indoor and outdoor base stations from the RAN to the core network after the construction work. They achieved end-to-end, zero-touch provisioning, which Rakuten says is “a first of its kind in open RAN deployment.” This allows Rakuten Mobile to visualize the network status on the operation support system (OSS) and enable remote operation and monitoring.
Shilpa Atri, department manager in the RAN Integration Department, said in a video: “Because of the automation, most of our base stations are zero-touch commissioned, helping us to bring approximately 100 to 200 sites on-air each day compared to 10 to 20 sites per day when we started these operations.”
The RAN integration Department works as a hybrid team located in Japan and India. System automation and the time-zone difference enabled a 24-hour operating shift.
Puneet Handa, division manager within the Network Engineering and Operations Division, said, “In Rakuten Mobile, we have integrated over 200,000 cells across Japan in different technologies. We built a framework which is extremely agile, efficient and scalable. Base station construction to acceptance is completely managed digitally and with a groundbreaking time from power-on to ready-for-services.”
Rakuten Mobile plans to take its processes and tools to Rakuten Symphony to re-sell them to other operators around the globe.
"So proud of what our team have done, exceeding 96% population coverage two years after our commercial launch is really an incredible achievement, with over 200,000 cells on air we are delivering on a world class mobile experience to our customers in Japan," said Rakuten Mobile CEO Tareq Amin, in a LinkedIn posting today.
AST Space Mobile
Last year, when Rakuten Mobile said it was accelerating the build-out of its greenfield network, it became apparent that the last 4% of its population coverage would be challenging.
The company is working with AST SpaceMobile to achieve 100% geographic coverage in Japan.
AST SpaceMobile is planning a launch of its BlueWalker-3 prototype satellite this summer and has a multi-launch agreement with SpaceX for its BlueBird satellites, said a Rakuten spokesperson today.
Per AST's 4th quarter investor update, the satellite launches are on schedule. All pre-launch testing and integration are nearing completion. Once in orbit, AST will be testing in the U.S., Japan and globally with its partners.
Last summer, Amin talked about the company’s work with AST SpaceMobile. He said, “Most operators keep talking about the coverage they provide in terms of population density coverage. We want to talk about area square-kilometer coverage. We want to have 100% coverage. Now that’s unique.”