WHY TELECOM’S HOPES AND DREAMS HINGE ON SOFTWARE

WRITTEN BY: JESS GIBSON

PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

At a pivotal moment for telecoms, Rakuten Symphony unveils the revolutionary future offered by a Mobile-as-a-Software mindset & modular technology

Cast your mind back over the last forty years of evolution in telecoms – a considerable amount has changed in this time, right?

Though this may appear to be the case, what with the development of mobile phones themselves, the critical layers upon which such evolution has been predicated have actually remained pretty much, well, the same. After all, if it isn’t broken, why fix it?

But it’s this attitude that has the industry trapped in a vice-like grip, reliant on arduously clunky hardware-based systems that should, by now, have been relegated to the past.

With the very nature of mobile services ripe for a revolutionary reimagination, then, Rakuten Symphony was born. Functioning as the telecoms arm of the Rakuten Group – a strategic B2B, digital bank and ecommerce and digital contents group with more than 1.7 billion members worldwide – its entire premise is based on one radical decision: choosing not to build its mobile network on legacy hardware.

“The idea to move the entire mobile architecture into a software-centric platform isn’t a small evolution. It's a revolution of how networks are engineered, built, and architected based on new, modern cloud architecture, in which Open RAN is just one pillar of the many things that we have done,” says Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony.

More than happy to prove the naysayers wrong and propel Rakuten Symphony into a leading position within telecoms, Amin set about building a team, an ecosystem and the network he envisioned.

Truths of telecoms & reimagining mobile networks

It’s a truth universally acknowledged (in the telco world, at least) that in its current state, “the industry is in decline”.

After failing to evolve alongside the global technological landscape for the past few decades, telecoms has proven slow to change, to drive forward, and to differentiate. This has led to declining revenues and returns amid increasing costs and competition, placing the industry in a precarious position.

Meanwhile, across this same 40-year period, cellular networks and enterprise IT have undergone multiple stages of evolution to reach where they are today – so why is it that progress for the infrastructure itself has stymied? One suggestion is the sheer amount of capital invested in data centre real-estate; another is a collective lack of understanding regarding the cloud. Amin had his own ideas.

“For me personally, before Rakuten, my own mindset was completely opened and transformed by a visit I had to Facebook before it was called Meta,” he shares. “Seeing how other enterprise IT companies, hyperscalers, and webscalers run their

Tareq Amin

TITLE: CEO

COMPANY: RAKUTEN SYMPHONY

INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS

LOCATION: CALIFORNIA, US

Tareq Amin is a technologist, business leader and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience driving telecom innovation.

Amin launched Rakuten Symphony, a Rakuten Group company, in August 2021 with a vision to reimagine telecom for a hyperscale era, delivering the convergence of IT and telecom networks. As the CEO of Rakuten Symphony, Amin has taken the company from start-up to industry disruptor, introducing to the market his bold vision of mobile as a software. Believing that traditional tools used by industry incumbents are outdated and do not meet the demands of modern connectivity, and drawing on the proven technologies and operating principles of hyperscale leaders, Amin has overseen the creation of the industry’s first modern, industrial-scale automation platform built specifically for telecom.