- The data-hungry user base of Japan’s newest mobile operator continues to grow
- One of Rakuten Mobile’s current areas of focus is greater energy efficiency
- It is putting its RAN intelligent controller (RIC) to work next year as part of a broader campaign to reduce power consumption by up to 20%
As Japan’s newest telco, Rakuten Mobile, continues to grow its customer base and network data traffic, it is introducing multiple green network initiatives, including the commercial deployment of its RAN intelligent controller (RIC) platform, that it hopes will lead to energy savings of between 15% and 20%.
During a webcast briefing with analysts and the media on Tuesday (19 November), Sharad Sriwastawa, co-CEO of Rakuten Mobile and president of its vendor unit Rakuten Symphony, provided an update on the operator’s progress (of which more later). He outlined a number of initiatives, including one aimed at improving the energy efficiency of its network operations, something that all mobile operators are seeking to achieve in order to keep operating costs under control as more and more data is transported over their networks: Rakuten Mobile users, for example, are currently consuming 30 GBytes of data per month.
Sriwastawa noted that the “focus for this quarter and the coming year” is to achieve “anything between 15% to 20% saving on overall power consumption” by mobile base stations and its portfolio of datacentre facilities: Rakuten Mobile currently has four central datacentres, 43 regional datacentres, and 1,906 edge datacentres (with more than 38,000 servers in operation) and over 64,000 macro cell sites.
