Rakuten Mobile and its infrastructure arm Rakuten Symphony announced the nationwide deployment of an in-house RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) platform across Rakuten's 4G and 5G Open RAN network in Japan on May 28, 2025 — one of the world's first nationwide RIC deployments in a commercial Open RAN — with a stated target of reducing network energy consumption by 15 to 20 percent.
"From day one, Rakuten Mobile has been committed to building, deploying and operating an automated, cloud-native, intelligent and open network powered by software," said Sharad Sriwastawa, Co-CEO of Rakuten Mobile and President of Rakuten Symphony. "This RIC deployment is a major milestone in our journey to build a fully automated, sustainable and intelligent mobile network. By leveraging AI and Open RAN, we are not only reducing our environmental footprint but also creating a more agile and cost-effective infrastructure that will enable us to deliver innovative services to our customers."
The motivation is concrete: mobile networks consume a disproportionate share of operator energy budgets, and within a typical mobile network the Radio Access Network (RAN) alone accounts for around 80 percent of total power consumption, driven largely by always-on capacity built to absorb peaks of demand the rest of the day rarely sees. Rather than accept that as fixed, Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony built a software layer that pushes back on the energy curve.
The deployment is the culmination of a Rakuten project initiated in 2023 to develop an Open RAN multi-vendor interoperability platform aimed at reducing mobile network operational costs and improving the subscriber experience, and validates the potential of RIC to transform traditional RAN into intelligent, programmable networks that open new revenue opportunities for mobile operators.
The system centers on in-house developed rApps — powered by machine learning algorithms — that continuously analyze subscriber traffic patterns, predict short-term demand, and dynamically adjust base station utilization for optimal efficiency, turning a traditionally static RAN into a self-optimizing layer.
The RIC platform runs across Rakuten's nationwide 4G and 5G Open RAN mobile network in Japan, applying AI-driven optimization, decision making, and automation to every cell rather than to a pilot subset, and is commercially available to other operators through the Rakuten Symphony Symworld bundle.
Looking ahead, Rakuten Mobile is co-chair of the O-RAN ALLIANCE Sustainability Focus Group and is partnering with Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) on advanced Open RAN research for the Beyond 5G era and on edge-cloud capabilities for next-generation communications, with the stated objective of continuing to reduce CO2 emissions while expanding network programmability and revenue opportunities for mobile operators.