The RIC will be offered for free to Rakuten Symphony customers who buy Symworld applications
As the focus of Open RAN discussion expands beyond capex and opex savings to also include an emphasis on disaggregated, cloud-based RAN as a vector for innovation, there’s a new focus on the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). The RIC comes in two flavors, near-real-time and non-real-time, and ingests network telemetry and serves as a platform for xApps and rApps that action on the data, doing things like continuous optimization, energy management, and other network and spectrum resource management.
This week Rakuten Symphony, the software, hardware, integration and turnkey network delivery arm of Rakuten Mobile, announced it will bring Juniper Network’s RIC into its Symworld offering. Further, Rakuten Symphony customers will receive the RIC for free with the purchase of Symworld applications.
For background on the role of the RIC in an Open RAN architecture, read the following:
- What is the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC)?
- What is the innovative potential of Open RAN? It’s all about the RIC
- Open RAN—near-real-time RIC vs. non-real-time RIC
In a call with media and analysts, Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin, also CEO of Rakuten Mobile, discussed the partnership with Juniper as all about changing the business model associated with the RIC, and bringing intelligence and automation into the RAN.
Amin walked through the four principles of the Rakuten Symphony organization—openness, mobile-as-a-software, automation and collaboration—and said “relentless automation” is a key goal of the work with Juniper, calling the deal a “massive innovation.”
He described the goal as the ability to onboard and run RAN applications the same way a consumer would access applications in the Android or Apple app stores. Noting the ongoing criticism around the Open RAN hardware/software and orchestration systems integration process, Amin said the two firms are working toward “a completely digital SI. It’s a noble concept that will drive the telecom industry to an Apple-like, Android-like” experience.
Amin said Rakuten Symphony and Juniper have a shared vision of how telecom networks need to be modernized, and that Juniper’s RIC is the most mature, “industry-leading” offering available. He said that in the current telecom paradigm, regardless of the operator’s approach to cloud (public, private, or hybrid), it takes an average of between seven and nine months to onboard one application. “We want to do it in one day…The value-add is just tremendous.”
Juniper Networks Rami Rahim called his firm’s RIC “truly a unique product…It’s the industry’s most mature RIC platform.” Running through the solution’s highlights, he called out that the Juniper RIC is fully-compliant with O-RAN specs, can integrate with any third party xApps and rApps, and has been put through its paces by Tier 1 operators—”It’s real and this is validated through a variety of different partnership opportunities…it’s actually real.”
