Rakuten Mobile to deploy 3,000 open mMIMO radios in Japan

Rakuten Mobile plans to install about 3,000 32T32R massive MIMO radios across Japan in the first phase of a new rollout, using an open RAN architecture. The company expects these radios, equipped with higher-gain antennas, to widen coverage and deliver roughly a 7% throughput increase in busy areas, according to Sudhakar Pandey, head of RAN at Rakuten Mobile.

The deployment targets high-traffic zones where added capacity and more efficient spectrum use can ease congestion. Rakuten Mobile is positioning this phase as a step to strengthen its network performance while continuing to lean on open, software-driven infrastructure instead of traditional, closed vendor systems.