Japan’s Rakuten Mobile joins O-RAN Alliance; launches eKYC services

Japanese telecoms operator Rakuten Mobile, which is betting heavily on its cloud-native telco platform Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), on Thursday joined the O-RAN Alliance, a telco community that promotes open, fully-interoperable radio access networks (RAN).

At the same time, Tareq Amin, Representative Director, Executive Vice President and CTO of Rakuten Mobile, has been appointed as a member of the board of directors of the O-RAN Alliance.

RCP is a cloud-native telco platform that enables telcos and enterprises around the world to easily build secure and open mobile networks at speed and low cost, to generate new revenue streams, and to offer customers innovative and immersive experiences, ETTelecom had reported.

RCP was developed by Rakuten Mobile and is based on its new generation mobile network in Japan which combines the latest technology in virtualization and automation, including containers and microservices, and is built on key secure operations principles.

“At Rakuten Mobile, we believe that OpenRAN is the future evolution of mobile networks,” said Tareq Amin, Representative Director, Executive Vice President and CTO of Rakuten Mobile.

“As a member of the O-RAN ALLIANCE, we will leverage the experience gained from the development of our open, virtualized network in Japan to contribute to the creation of a fully open standard for RAN for the world,” Amin added.

By defining O-RAN architecture and specifications, the O-RAN Alliance aims to enable an open and interoperable supply chain ecosystem that complements the standards promoted by 3GPP and other industry standards organizations.

As a member of the O-RAN Alliance, Rakuten Mobile will contribute to the technical development of innovative, open and intelligent RAN, the telco said in an official statement.

In a separate development, Rakuten said it will launch its eKYC service “AI Kantan Honnin Kakunin” (AI Easy ID Verification) for online contracts for its mobile carrier service on 9 November 2020.

The eKYC service will initially be introduced for contracts made through the My Rakuten Mobile Android app from November 9 and Rakuten plans to bring the eKYC service to iOS devices on November 30 and will expand the service to contracts made through the official Rakuten Mobile website.

Rakuten Mobile’s eKYC service utilizes the “Digital KYC” identity verification service supplied by NEC Corporation.