Today, Rakuten announced that has acquired the rest of Open RAN startup, Altiostar. It already owned 67% of the pioneering vendor, and paid another $370 million to acquire the rest, at a valuation just over $1 billion. The company is adding Altiostar to its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) capabilities now… Read More »Rakuten Acquires Altiostar; and Announces European Customer, 1&1
This week’s MWC Barcelona 2021 had several themes; the most important was that several outsiders to the telecom industry were ever-present. The new entrants – the party-crashers – included Starlink, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute, and NVidia. These new players are forcing change either through economics, new technology,… Read More »The Party-Crashers of MWC21
In a briefing with Rakuten Mobile today, we learned two neat things: It is experimenting with 3GPP on satellite, and it hopes to announced a full-stack Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) customer as early as next quarter. The company also shared some plans that it has for improving coverage to 96%… Read More »Rakuten Mobile Reveals Future plans
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… Read More »Rakuten Communications Platform update
