Rakuten Mobile, the parent company of the Rakuten Symphony cloud connectivity platform, and Qualcomm Technologies have jointly announced a collaboration to develop a next-generation 5G Radio Unit (RU) with Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) capabilities and distributed units (DUs).
This collaboration is aimed at delivering an Open RAN Massive solution that supports configurations of up to 64T64R, which will, according to the companies, enhance coverage, improve cell-edge data speeds, as well as increase the overall capacity of the network. This will also enable enhanced speed in the rollout of 5G networks with Open RAN-compliant infrastructure products.
Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony, commented: “The new RUs and DUs developed with the support of Qualcomm Technologies aim to offer mobile operators and other organisations a dynamic and cost-effective way to deploy high-performance, virtualised 5G networks through the adoption of Open RAN-compliant software and infrastructure.”
Using the Qualcomm X100 5G radio access processing (RAN) accelerator card and Massive MIMO Qualcomm QRU100 5G RAN platform, the new products are designed to enhance Rakuten Symphony’s Symware product portfolio of Open RAN solutions that enable the deployment of innovative, virtualised and open 5G networks at scale, help operators to meet performance demand at the edge, and simplify and lower total cost of ownership of 5G deployments.
Combining Rakuten’s Symphony’s cloud-native and Open RAN-based network with Qualcomm Technologies’ expertise in developing Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) 5G solutions for device and infrastructure products will unleash the potential on how mobile networks are designed and how next-generation solutions are delivered, offering new opportunities to create innovation within their networks.
Junko Sunaga, Vice-President, Qualcomm Japan GK, and President of Qualcomm Japan, concluded: “Joining forces with Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony is at the heart of advancing the cellular ecosystem and accelerating the innovation cycle to enable the fast track of deploying modern networks at scale. We look forward to continuing this collaboration.”