Japan’s newest mobile network operator (MNO) Rakuten Mobile hopes to introduce services over the so-called ‘platinum band’ (900MHz) from March 2024, the firm’s chief executive officer Tareq Amin recently informed investors on a conference call. According to Amin: ‘The deployment of [the] platinum band will be done at an extremely low cost. We will utilise and reuse our existing base stations, all of the accessories from batteries, rectifiers, even fronthaul backhaul, dark fibre, where we reuse the existing infrastructure that exists … Also, the software for radio access is a technology that is owned by Rakuten Symphony. So thus, we believe that CAPEX is negligible if you compare deployment of [the] platinum band of Rakuten Mobile versus other telecom companies in Japan or across the world.’
The newcomer’s in-deployment 4G LTE network reached 97.9% of the population at 30 September 2022, with 50,400 base stations on air at that date, and it targets 99% coverage in 2023 when that figure will have increased to over 60,000. However, Japan’s newest MNO has a long way to go if it is to challenge the might of NTT DOCOMO, KDDI (incl. UQ Communications’ mobile TD-LTE operations) and SoftBank Corp in the market. Rakuten Mobile had only 4.55 million MNO and 630,000 MVNO subscriptions at the end of the third quarter, a market share of around 2%, while its quarterly net losses widened to JPY120.9 billion (USD860 million), from JPY105.2 billion in Q3 2021, albeit revenue increased by 62.5% to JPY89.3 billion.