By Sean Kinney, Editor in Chief

Rakuten Symphony kept the playing the hits at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, announcing a three-country Open RAN trial with operator MTN. Throughout the week, Rakuten Symphony has discussed its Symworld and Symware portfolios, announced the acquisition of Kubernetes specialist Robin.io, and announced a collaboration with AT&T.

For the MTN deal, Rakuten Symphony is working with Accenture and Tech Mahindra to run live 4G and 5G Open RAN trials in South Africa, Nigeria and Liberia. MTN Group Chief Technology and Information Systems Officer Mazen Mroue said the goal is “to modernize our [RAN] footprint…[and] actively driving the rapid expansion of affordable 4G and 5G coverage across markets in Africa.”

Elsewhere in Africa, we’ve seen Open RAN activity from Orange and Parallel Wireless in Central African Republic, and from Vodafone in Democratic Republic on Congo. As the ecosystem works on Open RAN massive MIMO technology, some live deployments, notably in the UK, are in less-demanding rural markets. The idea is to cost-effectively expand rural coverage while Open RAN matures and reaches performance parity as compared to integrated systems prior to deployment in dense urban areas. All that said, Rakuten Mobile deployed first in Tokyo, so you could certainly use that as a proof point to debunk the notion Open RAN isn’t currently ready for urban deployments.

Rakuten Symphony’s keystone commercial client is 1&1 in Germany which hired the Japanese firm to build a greenfield network leveraging existing fiber and data center resources. MTN, on the other hand, already runs a network making this newly announced project a public foray into brownfield, which Chief Revenue Officer Rabih Dabboussi noted in a statement. “This PoC will demonstrate how one of the world’s top-tier brownfield mobile operators can utilize Rakuten Symphony’s network automation and orchestration solutions for cost-effective network transformation and timely deployment of next-generation network services to their customers in Africa.”

Also during the congress this week, Rakuten Symphony and AT&T detailed a collaboration that’s seeing the US operator use Rakuten’s Site Manager, a software package meant to simplify design/build workflows for network deployments. The pair are integrating AT&T’s proprietary capacity planning tool into Site Manager.

AT&T EVP and Network Chief Technology Officer Andre Fuetsch said the company is investing in “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 networks as well as across our global industry to build and operate more resilient networks in a new architecture stack with less manual touches.”https://www.rcrwireless.com