by Chris DePuy / September 24, 2026
This week, Rakuten Mobile announced it has surpassed 11 million subscribers. We read the number as a validation of the bet Rakuten has made since it entered the market: that a carrier can build its own network on Open RAN — open, virtualized, cloud-native radio and core technology — and grow against entrenched incumbents. Rakuten is the telecom industry’s clearest proof point of an operator that built its own network on open technology, and in pushing Open RAN it has helped carriers around the world by enabling increased interoperability across the RAN stack. None of it came from a traditional operator: Rakuten is fundamentally an ecommerce company, and its entry has genuinely shaken up the Japanese mobile market.
The milestone, announced by Rakuten Mobile on September 25 (Tokyo time), counts 11 million total subscribers as of September 24, 2026, including BCP lines. Excluding those, combined MNO, MVNO and MVNE subscribers total 10.96 million, with MNO-only subscribers at 10.18 million. Rakuten Mobile took roughly nine months to add its latest million, following the 10 million milestone it reached on December 25, 2025 — itself about five years and eight months after its April 2020 commercial launch, which was built on a fully virtualized, cloud-native network from the start.
The growth has been driven by service expansion and the Rakuten ecosystem, per the same release. The Rakuten Saikyo U-NEXT plan launched in October 2025 bundles unlimited data with the U-NEXT content library, and adoption of the Saikyo Family Discount is up roughly 40% year over year. Rakuten has also leaned on non-telco synergies — the Saikyo Senior Program gained anti-fraud insurance through Rakuten General Insurance, and Rakuten Mobile paired with Rakuten Bank on a bonus interest-rate service launched in February 2026 — and it began holding weekly in-store smartphone classes for senior users in June 2026.
The subscriber wins show up in third-party surveys. In Mobile Marketing Data Labo’s August 2026 survey, Rakuten Mobile placed first on customer loyalty and as the carrier users would most likely pick when switching, and it has now been the top switching destination for six straight years, per the press release. It also placed first overall in ORICON’s 2025 customer-satisfaction survey of the mobile-carrier market — the third year in a row — and earned its first overall No. 1 in MMD’s April 2026 corporate mobile survey. For a network that entered a four-carrier market a little over six years ago, the trajectory confirms that a non-traditional operator can compete on price, service and network alike.
For the RAN market, Rakuten Mobile’s scaling is the reference deployment for what Open RAN and virtualized RAN can do when an operator commits to them fully. It has pushed the RAN stack toward interoperability, giving equipment suppliers a working multi-vendor model to build against, and it has shown incumbents that openness is no longer a greenfield-only argument. The question going forward is whether the fourth carrier’s momentum translates into sustained share gains against operators that already share nationwide infrastructure and spectrum depth. 650 Group researches several of the technologies we covered in this blog, including Mobile RAN and Telecommunications Core, and more.