AT&T and Rakuten Symphony Collaborate to Enhance Network Design and Build Solutions for Operators

BARCELONA, Feb. 28, 2021

What’s the news? AT&T* and Rakuten Symphony have signed a collaboration agreement to enhance solutions within the Symworld platform to accelerate network planning and deployment in both greenfield and brownfield environments. The companies aim to develop and bring to market solutions through the platform by drawing on technologies, experience, and expertise currently used for widescale network deployments by AT&T in the U.S. and Rakuten Mobile in Japan.    

AT&T is currently deploying Rakuten Symphony’s Site Manager, a solutions suite within the Symworld platform that simplifies the design and build workflows for network rollouts. The suite is for both wireless and wireline networks and designed to drive significantly faster deployment cycles. As part of the initial phase of the agreement, the companies are integrating AT&T’s homegrown core RANFT technology platform for capacity planning within the solutions suite. The RANFT tool utilizes AT&T experience and expertise on network builds across various topographies and densities and adds a new dimension to Rakuten Symphony’s Site Manager and more specifically RAN Commander for capacity planning within the suite of tools. 

Why is this important? Operators are building their 5G networks differently than any previous generation. As the telecom industry transforms with the large-scale introduction of cloud, open architectures and software and supplier diversity, Rakuten Symphony’s Site Manager, enhanced with AT&T innovations, will empower operators across the globe to plan, deploy, and operate at scale in this new cloud-native and open era. The two companies intend to continue collaborating to develop new capabilities and offer additional solutions to mobile network operators across the globe to simplify, digitalize and automate their mobile network deployments.  

What is Rakuten Symphony’s Symworld platform? Symworld offers intuitive, one-touch access to a suite of next-gen network software apps that can modernize and automate any mobile network. It enables industrialized automation and data driven solutions for planning, designing, deploying, operating, securing and maintaining new and existing networks at the speed and scale of the cloud. Site Manager is a solutions suite within the Symworld platform that simplifies and accelerates the design and build workflows for wireless and wireline network deployments.

Where can I get more information? For more information, please visit https://symphony.rakuten.com/

What people are saying:

Andre Fuetsch
Executive Vice President & Network Chief Technology Officer, AT&T
“AT&T has heavily invested in developing state-of-the-art tools and capabilities, such as AI/ML and data analytics, to support and manage our intelligent, virtualized networks in the most efficient way possible. Our collaboration with Rakuten Symphony helps expand and enhance the transformation of our network as well as across our global industry to build and operate more resilient networks in a new architecture stack with less manual touches.”

Tareq Amin
CEO, Rakuten Symphony
“The way of deploying and operating mobile networks must modernize to embrace the industrialized automation required of a supply chain which contains choice and competition. For operators who want to deploy, operate and scale at the speed of cloud, there is a new way. We’ve done it in Japan with the Rakuten Mobile network, having just achieved 96 percent population coverage in record time since full-scale commercial launch in 2020. We’re thrilled to begin this initial collaboration with AT&T to usher in a new era of telecom, offering a new world of automated and intelligent tools to simplify and digitalize network planning and operating for both greenfield and brownfield operators.”

*About AT&T Communications
We help family, friends and neighbors connect in meaningful ways every day. From the first phone call 140+ years ago to mobile video streaming, we @ATT innovate to improve lives. AT&T Communications is part of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T). For more information, please visit us at att.com.

About Rakuten Symphony
Rakuten Symphony is reimagining telecom, changing supply chain norms and disrupting outmoded thinking that threatens the industry’s pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. Based on proven modern infrastructure practices, its open interface platforms make it possible to launch and operate advanced mobile services in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches, with no compromise to network quality or security. Rakuten Symphony has headquarters in Japan and local presence in the United States, Singapore, India, Europe and the Middle East Africa region. For more information, visit: https://symphony.rakuten.com/