Cisco installs 4,000 edge nodes for Rakuten’s wireless network

Rakuten seems to be everywhere, all of a sudden. This is the e-commerce company that’s building a greenfield wireless network in Japan. The other day in Denver I heard a commercial on the radio with the announcer spelling R.A.K.U.T.E.N. My ears perked up. Really, the company is advertising its e-commerce site in the U.S? Then, yesterday in Barcelona, I was strolling past a store in the Gothic section of the city, and all the T-shirts in the store said “Rakuten.” Apparently, the company is a big soccer sponsor in Barcelona.So of course, who would be featured prominently at Cisco’s media gathering Sunday night to kick off Mobile World Congress 2019? Rakuten, of course.Rakuten’s CTO Tareq Amin said at the gathering that the company’s new wireless network shows that “telco can live in the cloud.”  Rakuten builds a greenfield wireless network in Japan He said when the company started thinking about building a wireless network, it considered the option of selecting traditional designs. And he said that the telecom industry, in general, doesn’t always reward innovators. Nevertheless, the company decided to build a greenfield network that uses more software and virtualization.