AT&T and Rakuten Symphony announce Symworld joint venture
Rakuten Mobile named Nokia as the sole vendor for specific mobile core products such as IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), shared data layer (SDL) and IoT platform.
This builds on the multi-year relationship between the Finnish vendor, Japan’s Rakuten Mobile network operator and the Rakuten group’s newer subsidiary, Rakuten Symphony.
As ever, the plan is grand: to, “accelerate industry change with the inclusion of all Nokia cloud-native core software on Rakuten Symphony’s Symworld marketplace. The development will support Rakuten Symphony to be the first to enable browsing, selecting, and installing of software into live network operations via a ‘one-click’ operation for communication service providers (CSPs).”
Rakuten Symphony announced the Symworld marketplace in mid-February to simplify the process of onboarding telecom applications for operators and making approved applications generally available for all Symworld customers.
The Symworld platform intends to digitalise all telecom processes for planning, deploying, securing and monitoring the software in live telecom networks, as telecoms software begins its migration to cloud native.
Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony (and formerly CTO of Rakuten Mobile) said, “Wehave a long and successful relationship with Nokia in Rakuten Mobile and together in Japan we have radically accelerated change in the telecom industry.
“We want to do more and we are extremely happy to partner with Nokia now to drive the marketplace way of working in the live network with Nokia’s world class cloud-native core products. The Symworld marketplace approach to deployment changes system integration from being months away, to being days or hours away.”
Yesterday AT&T and Rakuten Symphony announced a collaboration agreement to enhance solutions within the recently launched Symworld platform. Their aim is to speed network planning and deployment in greenfield and brownfield environments, drawing on their combined technologies, experience and expertise from AT&T in the US and Rakuten Mobile in Japan.
AT&T is deploying Rakuten Symphony’s Site Manager, a solutions suite on the Symworld platform intended to simplify the design and build workflows for fixed and mobile network roll-outs to speed up deployment cycles.
In the initial phase of the agreement, the companies are integrating AT&T’s core RANFT technology platform, developed in-house, for capacity planning which can be applied to various network topographies and densities. It rounds out the tool suite within Rakuten Symphony’s Site Manager and more specifically for RAN Commander.
Andre Fuetsch, Executive Vice President & Network Chief Technology Officer, AT&T, commented,“AT&T has heavily invested in developing state-of-the-art tools and capabilities, such as AI/ML and data analytics, to support and manage our intelligent, virtualized networks in the most efficient way possible.
“Our collaboration with Rakuten Symphony helps expand and enhance the transformation of our network as well as across our global industry to build and operate more resilient networks in a new architecture stack with less manual touches.”