Real-world: Multi-vendor O-RAN — Rakuten, Dish, Vodafone, NTIA

Rakuten Symphony: Greenfield O-RAN at Scale

Rakuten Mobile launched the world's first fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network in Japan, building from scratch on O-RAN principles. Their architecture runs the CU and DU as virtualized network functions on commercial off-the-shelf servers, connected to multi-vendor O-RUs from vendors including Airspan, NEC, and Nokia. The Rakuten Symphony platform provides the orchestration layer, managing thousands of cell sites through a centralized operations platform. Their experience demonstrated that O-RAN-based networks can achieve coverage and performance comparable to traditional integrated…