Rakuten Mobile wins 2021 GLOMO Awards

July 5, 2021, Tokyo – Rakuten Mobile, Inc. today announced that the company was awarded two awards at the annual Global Mobile (GLOMO) Awards hosted by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) during the 2021 Mobile World Congress Barcelona.

The GLOMO Awards are widely recognized as the most prestigious recognition scheme in the mobile industry and judged by independent experts, analysts, journalists, academics, and mobile operator representatives. The Awards celebrate the companies and individuals driving innovation in the rapidly evolving mobile industry.

In the award category Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough, Rakuten Mobile won for its submission for 5G Open RAN on Kubernetes. Rakuten Mobile was also recognized with the CTO Choice: Outstanding Mobile Technology Award, the highest recognition from the global telco industry at the 2021 GLOMO Awards. A panel of industry experts comprised of more than 20 CTOs from every continent selected Rakuten Mobile as the overall technology winner from the eight best ‘Mobile Tech’ in 2020 award winners.

“We have achieved something not performed until now in the telco industry,” commented Tareq Amin, Representative Director, Executive Vice President and CTO of Rakuten Mobile. “I am incredibly proud of the team at Rakuten Mobile and our many partners for achieving a disaggregated Open RAN deployment on a container-based solution. And I am humbled that CTOs from around the world have recognized Rakuten Mobile for this technology breakthrough.”

John Hoffman, CEO, GSMA Ltd offered praise for Rakuten Mobile and all award winners, “Congratulations to all the winners and nominees of the GSMA’s GLOMO Awards 2021. You truly embody the theme of this year’s event, Connected Impact. Given the challenging circumstances we’ve all faced over the 15 months, it’s more important than ever to come together to recognize the incredible innovation and ingenuity shaping our industry, as well as the positive impact this is making on the world around us.”

The GLOMO judges commented on Rakuten Mobile, “This company, with ecosystem partners, has successfully deployed a fully open, cloud-native and cost-effective mobile network, a great benchmark for the operators globally to adopt and join the open network bandwagon.” 

Built together with its ecosystem partners, Rakuten Mobile’s solution is to run 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) functions as microservices in containers.  Containers are a lighter-weight, more agile way of handling virtualization — enabling the user to realize faster resource provisioning and speedier availability of new applications.

Another unique aspect of Rakuten Mobile’s award-winning solution is that the 5G RAN functions run as microservices on a commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware platform based on Open RAN specifications and cloud native technologies. This results in greater flexibility and elasticity in architecting; the ability to quickly scale and more easily deploy 5G networks; and the support of diverse 5G use cases with a lower total cost of ownership.