Rakuten Symphony wins JPY350m grant for Kyivstar open RAN trial

Rakuten Symphony received a grant of up to JPY350 million ($2.2 million) from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to partly fund open RAN field tests with Kyivstar in Ukraine.

Rakuten Symphony said it will provide a cloud-native open RAN environment in Ukraine and carry out validation testing as part of its collaboration with Veon-owned Kyivstar. Open RAN is an open radio access network architecture that separates hardware and software components and uses interoperable interfaces between vendors.

Rakuten Symphony and Kyivstar have already completed laboratory tests covering 4G product features and interoperability, along with OSS, cloud and related technologies. OSS means operations support systems used to manage and operate telecom networks. The next phase will expand the work to 4G and 5G configurations and add field testing.

The field trials will use 4G and will be conducted around Kyiv to test open RAN performance in a live brownfield network, meaning an existing mobile network environment. The work will include both distributed and centralized RAN architectures. Rakuten Symphony said 5G capabilities will be assessed in a laboratory because 5G remains in the test phase in Ukraine.