Rakuten Mobile has expanded the availability of its greenfield 4G LTE network to 25,000 customers and said it is on track to launch full commercial services in April.
The subsidiary of the ecommerce juggernaut, which is currently operating a limited range network on a trial basis, is running about six months behind schedule on its plan to deploy a fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network.
It originally planned to make its new network commercially available in October 2019, but has run into some challenges along the way. This included delays in the deployment of base stations and, despite claims that it had achieved full redundancy in November 2019, it suffered a glitch that interrupted voice and data services for its original 5,000 trial users last month, according to The Japan Times.
During the company’s third-quarter earnings presentation, Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin claimed that the cloud technologies that comprise the operator’s network “offer resiliencies that are much better than what you find today in traditional telecommunication networks.”