Why Rakuten Chose Rocky

Linux & CIQ For Its Entire Infrastructure

Rakuten Symphony entrusted open source Rocky Linux, supported by CIQ, to help spur a new era of telecom innovation.

In deploying Rocky Linux, we are returning to true open source principles.

Learn how Rocky Linux, supported by deep CIQ expertise, has radically reduced cost and delivered on business outcomes.

system, you break it into modules and pieces, and then you deploy, manage, upgrade, and patch each one separately. And the granularity of your infrastructure becomes wider, but also gains the ability to be agile, fast, adjust, interconnect.”

Welcome to The Symworld Platform

Thus, the concept of Mobile as a Software was born, with Rakuten Symphony planning, designing, and operating “nextgeneration, software-defined networks”. This comes in the form of the Symworld Cloud – the “leading unified telco edge cloud” that links from cell sites to central data centres – and the Symworld Network, with Open RAN 4G, Open RAN 5G, and Symware appliances, leading to the next generation of OSS and BSS.

Dabboussi explains further: “Existing OSS systems are quite complex and quite burdensome, built on element management systems. These are the tools that manage the elements of the network – or the network management system. These are the tools that bring it together at a network level. We eliminated both of these, and we built a complete observability framework that is abstracted from the vendor's specific technologies.

Rabih Dabboussi

TITLE: CHIEF BUSINESS OFFICER

COMPANY: RAKUTEN SYMPHONY

INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS

LOCATION: UAE

Rabih Dabboussi is Chief Business Officer of Rakuten Symphony, a new business organisation within the Rakuten Group to spearhead the global adoption of cloud-native open RAN infrastructure and services. In this role, Dabboussi is responsible for bringing Rakuten Symphony’s telco solutions, including the Rakuten Communications Platform, to operators, governments and enterprises around the world.

Dabboussi is a seasoned and highly recognised industry expert who brings more than two decades of experience in the mobile industry to Rakuten, including a 20-year progressive career at Cisco Systems in diverse roles of R&D, technology consulting, business development, and sales leadership.

With this software-centric approach, Rabih Dabboussi emphasises that though “hardware isn’t eliminated, it is standardised on common commodity hardware”, describing it as functioning in a way similar to Lego, with moveable, interlocking layers being stacked on top of each other.

Platform Infrastructure layer – open commodity compute systems that Rakuten call “the servers” and Open RAN radio units.

“The foundation of your network is this commodity-based hardware, which immediately solves the problem of being locked into monolithic proprietary systems, because now you're using off-the-shelf compute systems that can come from numerous different vendors around the world.”

Cloud layer – “On top of the foundation, you need the layer that aggregates all of this hardware and makes it look as a pool of compute resources, storage resources and networking resources available for you. That layer is called the cloud layer or the virtualisation layer, which is where you start getting into the software.

“We made a conscious decision from the beginning to unify the cloud, and then, on top of it, unify the operating system. So we use one single operating system, which is a containerised Kubernetes operating system.”

Open RAN and core network functions layer – “On top of that comes your logic, your network functions, which is all cloud-native software, including Open RAN Distributed Unit (DU) and Centralised Unit, and all core network functions.

“Now you need to manage the network. And again, because everything becomes software, it's much easier for us to build in a unified, abstract way in an observability framework to do config management, performance management, fault monitoring –all the dashboarding, the monitoring and the control of your network.”

Operations layer – “Here, adjacent to this, you need to plan, build, and operate the network while managing customers. The cloud-native Symworld Platform streamlines the complex mesh of support systems and custom integrations that all operators have accumulated. This helps telecom operators scale faster as the cloud sets the pace for speed, innovation, and network expectations.”

“That abstraction layer is through open interfaces and APIs, which allows us now to say, ‘whether you bring a technology from this vendor or that vendor, this supplier or that supplier, as long as they're compliant with those standard ways of managing, monitoring, and configuring those pieces of software in the network, then you don't need anything in between to translate’. And that ultimately resulted in significant agility in our network. This way, we can roll out hundreds of sites a day.”

The speed of this solution cannot be overstated: once the cell site has been constructed, it can take just “four minutes to bring a radio site on air” – from the time the labour team installs the radios through to connecting power and networks – because “everything is done automatically”.

“That helped us improve the productivity of our operations engineers, with over 300,000 cells managed by a team of only 250 people who are powered 20 times by the Symworld platform. A network of that size in North America has probably a few thousand engineers managing it.”

Functioning in individual, virtualised layers allows for a standardised foundation that can be built upon with “off-the-shelfsystems” around the world – adhering, to the nth degree, to Rakuten’s guiding principle of openness and Dabboussi’s “the future is nothing but Open RAN” mindset.

“The other benefit of this is the ability to automate and orchestrate, to make things faster and roll things out better; to troubleshoot in much quicker ways, identify the issues and fix them much quicker and so on. So that was really the drive behind building the network based on software.

“The aspiration is to have Rakuten Symphony become the de-facto platform for managing the whole lifecycle of a mobile network, from the idea of building a network all the way to the decommissioning, upgrade and refresh of the network, as well as everything in between that takes place,” explains Dabboussi.

Establishing a disruptive ecosystem

For this to occur, a disruptive ecosystem of partners is needed, all working together to future-proof the industry by driving down operational costs and unlocking static vendor relationships.

“Rakuten couldn't have done this without the ecosystem of partners that participated in our buildout of the network in Japan and that continue to participate with us, globally,” Dabboussi establishes. “These are both big names and small names, and there's many of them; we're very open and our ecosystem is quite large. A few examples of these partners, which are demonstrating with us at Mobile World Congress Barcelona, include BMI, BayTec, and CIQ.

“BMI is a small radio supplier of ours, and they’re only building Open-RAN-compliant radios. I have a lot of aspirations for them. If they continue to execute well, they can bring a real change in the industry.

“BayTec, meanwhile, manufactures and supplies numerous different components for us, from ancillaries and batteries to devices and small radio units.

”Our philosophy about open, software-centric mobile networks is pivotal for a successful transformation of the mobile industry.

“For telecom, Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony are working closely with CIQ to ensure that Rocky Linux is proven at scale in commercial operations. There is a large and growing proactive community of very large technology companies that are ensuring Rocky Linux is leading, in terms of certified software drivers and capability compatibility for telecom. Rocky Linux and the community are ensuring that it is the best alternative for the highly demanding telecom industry, which is seen as a proxy for all industries that require edge-to-core-tocloud solutions.”

The aim of the game here is disruption, which – in terms of partnerships –potentially means moving away from some of the legacy cloud licensing methods in the telco worlds in favour of smaller, more agile and innovative players that are changing the game.

“We feel that these three partners are foundational to what we do, but our partnerships aren’t exclusive to our existing partners. We’re so open and transparent, always looking for new innovators to come and join us in this mission, because we cannot achieve it alone. And the industry is heading that way – the more players and the more innovators, the more value and the more efficient the solution will be,” Dabboussi says.

“The ecosystem and the partnership environment that we have is super important to our success and quite complementary to our strategies.”

The future of Mobile as a Software

With Dabboussi envisioning a future that’s “nothing but Open RAN” and enthusing about the growing number of companies embracing a software-centric approach to mobile networks, he is particularly focused upon the four key ways he can turn that envisioned future into reality.

“It's very important for us to continue to stay the course in our mission, continue to improve and innovate in what we do – both on the technology pieces as well as the operating and commercial model.”

That means encouraging vendors and customers to sign up on “a complete cost transparency basis”. This isn’t to be limited to the technology pieces, it is to also include “the operating and commercial model, and the engagement and go-to market model” as well, due to the increasing volume of customers seeking out face-to-face interactions and resources located in the same time zone.

“So, ramping up our capabilities globally is super important, and we need to be a little more crisp in describing ourselves to the industry in general, but most importantly, to the stakeholders of our customers and decision-makers – which is exactly what this disruption is about and what the value behind that disruption is,” states Dabboussi.

“Last but not least is the call to the industry to come and join us in this journey. The more partnerships we establish and the more adoption of Software as a Service and Mobile as a Software architecture, the stronger this ecosystem becomes and the more value the whole industry will harness from it.

“I'm very bullish, very positive and very hopeful about what the future looks like for us.”

In the more immediate future, Dabboussi notes that there’s a focus on raising awareness and knowledge of Mobile as a Software through widespread education, feeding into this notion of a constantly evolving, disruptive ecosystem that’s synonymous with innovation.

“I'd like to see, hopefully very soon, some announcements around large, tier one national operators adopting our solutions. We're very close to making really good headways with a few of them – they're currently trialling and testing our systems, and we feel very positive about what's coming.

“We will continue to see improvement in the performance of the networks we're building. Rakuten’s network is considered in the top sixth percentile globally on performance and customer experience. On the engineering side, I see us introducing very interesting, innovative products and reference designs.”

Dabboussi concludes: “The next two years are our window of opportunity to lead the disruption in the industry and open a new chapter in the history of the telecom world. It's time for a change. And we'd like to have our name and our brand stand in that new chapter of telecom history.”