In conjunction with its recent Rakuten earnings call this week, Rakuten Mobile disclosed some more of its plans.  This mobile operator is becoming a telecom vendor.  Specifically, it said that “by expanding the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) globally, Rakuten aims to evolve from a Japan-headquartered tech company to a global leader in telecom.”  We see this as an explicit statement that the company plans to sell its telecom software and related services to operators worldwide.  For instance, Rakuten Mobile just announced a partnership with Saudi-based operator, stc.  This move pits Rakuten against Microsoft (who just acquired telecom companies and runs a cloud), Oracle (who runs a cloud and made telecom company acquisitions), and the rest of the telecom industry (traditionally Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, Amdocs, Netcracker and others). 

In offering RCP to other operators around the world, its unique value, as we see it, is that Rakuten has successfully built an LTE and now a 5G network based on Open RAN.  What we find interesting is that the company has developed a significant amount of intellectual property in-house or through technology sharing.  In an interview today with Tareq Amin, Rakuten Mobile executive, we asked what technology has been developed in-house by Rakuten.  Here’s what we learned.

• OSS (it acquired OSS vendor, Innoeye May 2020, which has sold to 20 other operators)
• BSS (developing in-house; expected completion by April 2021)
• Orchestration
• Radio software (it owns a substantial share of Altiostar)
• Cloud IP.  It cooperates with robin.io and has added significant services mesh, CPU-related optimizations, for instance
• Systems integration to make its “pods”
• Core.  It works with NEC on 5G Core and has access to its source code

Some other components are not developed by Rakuten (the radios come to mind), but this is an exciting development.  RCP would be delivered as a “private cloud” on the premises of carrier customers (partners).  The terminology Rakuten is using for this “private cloud,” is it’s a “pod.”  RCP’s plans are a very interesting development in the industry.

There is one more thing.  Rakuten said it is working with a technology supplier that will sell Rakuten a server card that would allow a combined router and RAN processing function to co-exist on a server.  Today, the servers it uses to support its Open RAN radios use an FPGA NIC.  These servers can support up to 16 base stations.  We see the addition of routing to this card as an extension of the capability – but it means there may be a diminished need for cell site routers. 

Before the consolidation in the Mobile Radio Access Network (MRAN) market that occurred in the past decade during Huawei’s ascendancy, there were a dozen major RAN vendors.  They included Motorola, Lucent, Alcatel, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, NEC, Fujitsu, Samsung, Nortel, Huawei and ZTE, and they hailed from the US, France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Canada and China. 


As Huawei entered the market, using a price aggressor strategy, it catalyzed mergers, resulting in the elimination of Motorola, Lucent, Alcatel, Siemens, Nortel, plus a reinforcement that led to the Japanese and Korean players to sell primarily to their home markets.  The result is that in many markets during recent years, there were only two vendors left, and that left operators with little choice but to look elsewhere. 

The punchline is that going forward, due in part to Open RAN, and in part to the response of operators looking outside their traditional supplier base, we now have 10 RAN players who can bid on projects.  And there is a multiplier on top of the 10 players, because going forward,  operators can buy radio heads from different vendors than their primary RAN baseband vendor, essentially doubling the number of choices an operator has when making mobile RAN vendor decisions.

Here is how we arrive at the conclusion that there were only two players per major geography.  Just a couple years ago, the state of affairs was quite different; we had only Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei and ZTE as players, and last year, it became clear that in the US, only two major players were left.  In China, the same could be said, with Huawei and ZTE as main suppliers (Ericsson has won business there and Nokia ceded the market in 2019).  And in 2020, we’ve seen much of Europe and English-speaking Asia whittle down to two suppliers, as well.

And here is how the procurement teams at operators have much choice in the future.  The “Open RAN” vendors are now deemed viable given the success at Rakuten and the push by operators to demand Open RAN compliance, and these include Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless.  Nokia and Ericsson are invited to most, if not all bids worldwide. 

Huawei and ZTE are invited to many, but a declining number of bids in markets that are siding with the US viewpoint.  We saw a turning point in late 2018 when AT&T announced it will buy from Samsung, who has now gotten a strong foothold in both India and the US.  And, more recently, we have seen two Japanese players, NEC and Fujitsu, in some way filling in the void left by Huawei and ZTE’s woes in the US/China spat, as they get wins (Fujitsu recently won DISH) and get invited to bid (NEC and Fujitsu are being asked to bid on UK projects).  Add these up and we have Altiostar, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, Samsung, NEC, Fujitsu. 

There are other factors at work that are adding to more RAN choices, as well.  Two such trends are Facebook’s efforts, ONF’s efforts and the variety of radio head vendors who are now viable with Open RAN/FB/ONF efforts.  Facebook has promoted projects such as Telecom Infra Project (TIP) that have many goals, including one that supports the goal of $1,000 radio heads (these cost much more from the major vendors). 

The Open Network Foundation (ONF) supports projects such as SD-RAN and Aether. 
Radios can be purchased from non-traditional sources, as well because with all three projects we have mentioned above (TIP, ONF SD-RAN and Open RAN), these allow radio purchases to be made separately from baseband purchases, literally doubling the choices that operators have when building out a roster of vendors.

The trends in mobile RAN have changed significantly.  Vendors with little to lose (startups and players entering new markets) are getting aggressive to grow their businesses.  Incumbent vendors are at risk, as their business practice of selling baseband and radio simultaneously to captive operators is coming to an end.  We may look back at this early 5G era and say there was a lot more to it than just the upgrade to 5G, and it begs the question, who will acquire whom to consolidate the market once again and get pricing under control.

We review the new announcements Cisco made public for the now-cancelled MWC20 show, and they are:  BNG on unified control plane, Unified Domain Center-to-DNA Center interoperation, IoT Control Center, SP Services Edge (CDN), new Open RAN partners, NCS 540 router with CPRI support, and Crosswork automation platform.  Since MWC is a show primarily focused on mobile and wireless, we think the two announcements that are most “wireless” in nature were: (a) Unified Domain Center announcement, which will unify management of WiFi to cellular operator LTE is interesting and (b) the partnerships Cisco announced with Open RAN vendors like Parallel Wireless, NEC and World Wide Technology.
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Summary of announcements by Cisco:
Core Networks 

• Core first in the 5G era.  Cisco believes SPs should focus on new services creation, and that process begins with selection of the core of the network.  So, its view is that the decision on how to architect a 5G networks begins with the core; in contrast, in the 3G era, selection of radio was first.
• CUPS / Packet Core.  The company now offers a single control-plane system that includes EPC, CCAP and BNG (BNG integration is a new announcement).  The user-plane can be delivered over three different systems:  Cisco VPP (servers) and/or Physical ASR 9000 and/or Physical NCS 5700.  These will then connect to various access systems: 3G, 4G, 5G (private and/or public), home, business.
• The company shared maximum throughputs of each of the user plane systems: VPP throughput 400 GB, ASR 9000-series 4 Tb, and NCS 5700 2.4 Tb.
• Cisco 5G Core engagements cover 1.3B mobile connections: VZ, Orange, kt, Spring, Rakuten, KDDI, Telenor, T-Mobile, Spark, Gogo, 5G RuralFirst, Working Group Two.  This list of engagements excludes 4G announcements.  Engagement: have deployed NSA or trialing NSA or SA.
• Dynamic microservices and cloud-native.
• Its 5G Core (Ultra Cloud Core) does forwarding 50% faster, services proxy 20% faster during congestion and 40% cell site capacity, and does traffic optimization that reduces congestion 30% to save on RAN expansion.

 
Unified Domain Center

• (new) Unified Domain Center.  SPs can expose their SP network to enterprise, as a managed service.  DNA Center manages WiFi – will see the SP slice.  We are in proof of concepts with a few SPs in the world
• The company has no public announcements to share yet
• This system works in conjunction with Cisco’s cloud-native packet core.
• Cisco has confidence in the deman for Unified Domain Center; in fact, according to a Cisco-led survey, 94% of customers want unified management of WiFi, CBRS/Private-LTE, FWA, etc.

 
IOT Control Center

• (new) IoT Control Center was announced.  This is based on technology Cisco got from the acquisition of services company, Jasper.  We did not get a lot of detail on what is new here, but is clear that Cisco is aggressively pursuing the IoT opportunity.

 
SP Services Edge 

• Delivering a CDN system (hardware, services, software) that can be provided to edge sites to allow distribution of things like Disney-Plus. 
• The business model, as we understand it - is Cisco pays for the equipment/software and gets paid based on usage.

 
Converged SDN Transport “New Engines”

• In Dec 2019, Cisco made an announcement around “Silicon One.”  Spokepersons today summarized this announcement for MWC as “New cards for existing routers, plus new routers, improving throughput.”
• NCS 540, 10/25/100 GE, 4.5x* vs ASR 900 – 300 Gb system
• ASR 9000 line card generation: 4 Tb/slot
• NCS 5700, 9.6 Tb/slot
• Cisco 8000, 14.4/Slot

 
Open RAN

• RAN has an advantage of 30-50% capex reduction.
• Partners planned for the MWC show:  Parallel Wireless, NEC, World Wide Technology partnership announced. 
• Cisco has momentum: Rakuten, Telenor, Etisalat, etc.

 
NCS 540

• (new) NCS 540.  Converged Fronthaul router.  Move towards IP implementation, reduces operations costs. 
• Indoor and outdoor, plus aggregation site router (includes CPRI support).

 
Automated Network Operations

• (new) Cisco Crosswork Automation Portfolio 
• Previously, had individual applications like Network Service Orchestrator (NSO), Situation Manager, etc.
• In the future, these applications can be delivered in an integrated platform called “Crosswork” 
• Single pane of glass: segment routing provisioned end to end to cell site to DC
• ACI routing capabilities are also being introduced that are SP-specific

 
Trusted path routing

• Routes around altered routing software images
• Security function

 

Keynotes at the NFV World & Zero-Touch Congress in San Jose, California were very interesting today.  We share our observations and view of the main themes from these interesting presentations by Nokia, NEC/Netcracker, Google, CenturyTel.  The main theme of these presentations, we think, is this:  NFV/SDN is now deeply in the deployment and commercial phase, where compared to 3-4 years ago, it was just a concept.  

Nokia.  The company announced that its Airframe server platform, which is an OCP based design, comes available with either embedded acceleration or pluggable acceleration.  This comment includes its software acceleration.  The company explained that its Reefshark chipset can be equipped on the Airframe server and can perform better than a non-accelerated server:

• Layer 1 and 2 offloading - 100% better
• Content acceleration - 30x better
• Machine Learning / video recognition - 10x better
• Crypto acceleration

In explaining functions that an Airframe with Reefshark can perform, the company gave a good example: massive MIMO beamforming can be assisted by the machine learning capabilities.  

NEC/Netcracker.  Enrique Gracia presented several uses cases of the NEC/Netcracker customers that related to NFV/SDN.  He explained that 16 customers have deployed one or more of these uses cases.

Full Stack OSS/BSS/MANO.  A customer deployed this system in 12 weeks to launch a VNF.  The system managed both physical and virtual devices.

Expand to a new territory using VNFs from home region.  A customer now delivers services to a customer outside the home territory by deploying the software and service from the network location at the home location.  In this particular case, NEC/Netcracker and its customer do revenue sharing and VNFs include SD-WAN, virtual firewall and others.  The service provider is expected to expand its customer addressable base by 40%, mainly targeting small/medium businesses in this non-home region.  This system uses MANO, OSS, BSS and the marketplace.  The company says in this case, time to revenue is expected to take 50% less time to deploy new VNFs in the future.

uCPE (Universal Customer Premises Equipment) deployment instead of branded hardware.  The company worked with a service provider company to enable uCPE to be deployed as an alternative to Cisco, Juniper and others' gear. 

Google Cloud.  Vijoy Pandey, who represented Google Cloud, presented on the topic of using AI/ML to reconfigure its data center system.  The company's cloud data center architecture has been evolving continuously since it was first introduced.  Currently, the company is using its own AI/ML system to learn from current network traffic patterns in order to design its future network architecture.  

CenturyTel.  The company has deployed Broadcom based Ethernet switches using its own Network OS.  These switches do their own packet forwarding.  Additionally, the company has built its own orchestration system called VICTOR.  It draws upon Ansible, NetCONF, uses the service logic interpreter from ONAP and uses parts of Open Daylight.  The company plans to open source this development and the spokesperson Adam Dunstan said, perhaps jokingly, that this might be called ONAP-lite.