Israel’s RADCOM and France’s Infovista join the Japanese cloud-native operator with global ambitions.
French company Infovista describes itself as “the leading provider of network planning, testing, performance and application control solutions”.
It said it is collaborating with Rakuten Mobile “to deliver the first carrier-grade, cloud-based platform for radio network planning, optimisation and modelling to support the rapid roll-out of Rakuten Mobile’s end-to-end cloud-native 5G mobile network across Japan”.
Integrated planning on-demand
The strategic radio network planning solution, made available as Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) NEO by Rakuten Mobile, is intended to directly contribute to the agility, high performance and scalability of the cloud-native network.
Infovista said this “on-demand” radio network planning solution was built for deployment in Rakuten Mobile’s RCP, and uses microservices architecture with open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
It will enable Rakuten Mobile’s engineering teams to use advanced planning and design features to reduce the time and cost of network deployment, through extensive automation and integration with other applications within RCP.
Planetary solution
The solution is based Infovista’s award-winning Planet software: the joint solution runs entirely on Linux and all microservices are delivered as Docker containers for high availability and scalability, and to readily integrate into the orchestration and automation provided by RCP.
These capabilities allow Rakuten Mobile to manage its planning database, automatically generate coverage, interference, throughput and other analysis and, in turn, enable capabilities such as auto-commissioning of sites and automation of other workflows.
Automated end to end
RADCOM offers monitoring tech for cloud-native networks. The company announced will implement its containerised assurance solution, RADCOM ACE, and its load-balancing wizardry to provide automated, end-to-end assurance for Rakuten Mobile’s recently launched Non-Stand Alone (NSA) 5G service and its Stand Alone (SA) 5G service launch, expected in 2021.
RADCOM ACE will be integrated into the RCP to monitor services end-to-end.
Eyal Harari, CEO of RADCOM, said, “Following a successful partnership during Rakuten Mobile’s full-scale commercial launch of the world’s first fully virtualized mobile network, we are excited to also support their 5G launch”.