Rakuten invests in Altiostar for virtual RAN

Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce and fintech company and soon to be the operator of Japan’s newest mobile network, will make a strategic investment in Altiostar Networks, a start-up based in Tewksbury, Mass. The investment is subject to approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

Altiostar provides a 5G-ready virtualized RAN software solution that supports open interfaces and disaggregates the hardware from the software to build an open multi-vendor web-scale network. The Altiostar solution supports macro and small cells, indoor and outdoor, enabling interference management, carrier aggregation and dual reception.

Rakuten said it is on track with the deployment of a fully virtualized mobile network in Japan by October 2019.

“Our vision for Rakuten Mobile Network is to build the world’s first end-to-end, fully virtualized, software-defined mobile network: A network that innovates at the Speed-of-Software and scales at the Speed-of-Cloud. Altiostar technology is key to realizing this vision within the year,” said Tareq Amin, CTO of Rakuten Mobile Network. “The whole Rakuten team is looking forward to working closely with Altiostar to take a leadership role in driving RAN virtualization and to bring disruptive innovation to the mobile industry.”

“Open RAN architecture and virtualization are key to building software-centric networks that can scale and adapt to meet an explosion of devices and applications driving service velocity and profits,” said Ashraf Dahod, CEO of Altiostar Networks. “This funding is going to help us expand our technology innovation to help operators like Rakuten to push new business models and bring affordable broadband to the masses through web-scale mobile networks.”

In addition to the investment, Rakuten Mobile Network President Yoshihisa Yamada and Chief Technology Officer Tareq Amin will join the board of Altiostar upon completion of the transaction.

http://www.altiostar.com