Real-world: Rakuten, Dish, and O-RAN-first operators

Pioneers of O-RAN Deployment

Several operators have made bold bets on O-RAN as their primary RAN architecture. Rakuten Mobile launched the world's first fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network in 2020 in Japan, running O-RAN on commodity hardware across 45,000+ cell sites. They developed the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) now sold to other operators. Dish Network built a greenfield 5G network entirely on O-RAN from day one in the United States, launching in 2022 as the first US operator to deploy O-RAN at scale with a multi-vendor O-RU, O-DU, and O-CU mix.