What’s up with… Rakuten Mobile, NEC, Nokia, ADTRAN

• Rakuten and NEC prep 5G core offer
• Nokia boasts impact of its liquid cooling tech (no, this is not beer-related)
• ADTRAN expands its SD-Access portfolio

Rakuten Mobile’s plans for a global telco functions app store and Nokia’s liquid cooling smarts are on top of today’s news pile.

• Rakuten Mobile has unveiled plans to offer the containerized standalone 5G core (5GC) network technology it is developing with NEC to other operators through via its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP). The disruptive Japanese operator says that once its standalone core is operational, the resulting cloud native functions, based on NEC’s source code, will “play a key role in the global expansion of RCP, a platform aimed at offering solutions and services for the deployment of virtualized networks at speed and low cost by telecom companies and enterprises around the world, tailored for their unique needs. The 5GC will be offered as an application on the RCP Marketplace, allowing customers to quickly and easily ‘click, purchase and deploy’ a fully virtualized SA 5G core network solution.” That news should send a shudder down spines at Ericsson and Huawei, which jointly account for more than half of the global mobile core platform market, which is worth about $8 billion per year, according to Dell’Oro.
• Here are TelecomTV we’re always interested in liquid cooling technologies, which will become a key focus for us when the UK pubs re-open their doors. But we’re also interested in the sustainability efforts of environmentally-friendly developers such as Nokia, which says in this announcement that its “liquid cooling 5G AirScale Base Station solution has helped Finnish mobile operator, Elisa, reduce the potential energy expenses of its base station by 30% and CO2 emissions by approximately 80%.” We’ll drink to that!
• Elsewhere in Nokia land, the Finnish vendor says it has completed the world’s largest Dynamic Spectrum Refarming deployment with India’s Vodafone Idea. For more details, see this press release.
• ADTRAN has been busy today. The fixed broadband network technology specialist has added new OLT, ONT and Ethernet aggregation switch products to its software-defined access portfolio, which is proving popular with multiple Tier 1 operators of late. It has also added support for Combo PON within its Total Access 5000 fiber access platform.  

- The staff, TelecomTV