Rakuten Mobile’s CTO says RAN wasn’t as troublesome as other things: Special Report on Automation

If there’s anyone who knows about network automation, it’s Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin. He’s leading the charge to build a greenfield LTE network in Japan that will launch commercially in early April. In advance of FierceWireless' virtual panel about network automation on Tuesday, March 24, Amin spoke with FierceWireless about Rakuten’s network automation work. Rakuten has worked with a bevy of vendors, and it’s also orchestrated open source software to build this fully virtualized network, which currently has about 188 virtual network functions and 6,000 virtual machines. Amin said, “The truth is this was not easy, but I have never, ever felt for a moment of my life this will not work.”