Telus hires Rakuten vRAN boss after 'deciding to go with O-RAN'

Japan's Rakuten lost its most recognizable telecom executive last week when Tareq Amin unexpectedly quit his roles as CEO of both Mobile, the domestic network unit, and Symphony, the part selling technology to operators outside Japan. The man in charge of virtual radio access network (RAN) development for Rakuten Mobile has now followed him out of the door.

Sushil Rawat has switched to Telus, where he will function as director of the Canadian operator's entire RAN strategy. It's obviously a step up on the career ladder and situates him at a brownfield operator apparently keen to make use of Rakuten-like technologies. Amin, his former boss, was among the first to offer congratulations on LinkedIn after Rawat notified the industry of his move.

The appointment is intriguing for numerous reasons. For a start, it follows news of open RAN collaboration between Telus and Rakuten. The story there was first broken by TelecomTV in September last year, with Amin hinting that Telus could use Rakuten to phase out Huawei, the controversial Chinese supplier excluded from the Canadian's 5G plans but still present in its 4G network.

"In 2020, 100% of our outdoor radio access network was through a Chinese partner and for various geopolitical reasons we were told we can't continue to use it," said Samer Geissah, the director of technology strategy and architecture for Telus, during the Big 5G Event that Informa (Light Reading's parent company) hosted in Austin in May. Under Canadian laws, Telus must remove any Chinese 5G equipment it has in the network by June next year. It is also required to strip Chinese suppliers out of its 4G network by 2027.

"What do we do now?" was Geissah's response when those laws were passed. The decision was between switching to other traditional suppliers, such as Ericsson, and attempting to make use of open RAN. The idea there is to shop around, buying parts and software for the same mobile site from multiple suppliers instead of one vendor system, as operators usually do. New specifications drawn up by the O-RAN Alliance, a telco-controlled industry body, are designed to help. "We decided to go with O-RAN, and we spent three years working through the complexities," said Geissah.

Sticking with the tried and trusted

Judging by public statements and the details of the operator's annual report, open RAN specialists have made little progress with Telus so far. When it comes to 5G, deals were announced with Ericsson, Nokia and South Korea's Samsung, but not Rakuten or others. Telus called out all three of those vendors in its last annual report, claiming its 5G network was available to as much as 83% of the Canadian population at the end of last year.

That said, both Nokia and Samsung boast products compatible with open RAN, even if Ericsson does not. The Swedish vendor has long complained about the readiness of open RAN for massive MIMO, an antenna-rich 5G technology that operators are deploying at scale. But a compromise agreement on new technical options, recently signed off in Osaka by Ericsson and other O-RAN Alliance stakeholders, robs it of an obvious reason to keep voicing those complaints.

Telus' five-year share price on NYSE ($)(Source: Google Finance)

Without disclosing names, Geissah told Big 5G Event attendees that Telus has been working with a total of six vendors on open RAN deployment. By May, it had set up three pilot clusters in "major urban markets," the first of which had been ongoing since 2022. Geissah was also citing various benefits.

Among those, zero touch provisioning at open RAN sites had reduced call-activation times to between two and three hours, compared with numerous days at traditional sites. Open radio units were consuming 10% less power than traditional ones. Telus was also spending just three weeks on integrating those radios with distributed units supplied by other vendors, down from three months at first.

Uplifting notes for Symphony

The decision to put a former Rakuten executive in charge of RAN strategy suggests open and virtual RAN technologies are set to play a much bigger role at Telus in future. It could also fuel speculation about a major deal between Telus and Symphony, which desperately needs to show progress with brownfield telcos. Symphony's revenues fell 18.5% year-over-year for the recent second quarter, to $72 million. That's negligible considering Rakuten previously valued its addressable market at between $80 billion and $100 billion for 2021.

Conversely, Rawat's departure from Rakuten might just signal he was ready for a fresh challenge or unhappy there after a sequence of disappointing results (his LinkedIn update came this week, but his profile curiously indicates he started at Telus in June while still being employed by Rakuten until August). Responsible for huge losses at group level, Mobile and Symphony are undoubtedly under intense pressure from Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten's founder and CEO, to land customers fast. Yet Amin's exit risks weakening the telecom business and seems unlikely to have buoyed staff morale.

If those 5G deployment figures are accurate, Telus would also presumably have to swap out equipment and software before they are due for replacement to accommodate Rakuten in a substantial manner. That would be expensive and risky. Rakuten's SymRAN software (originally Altiostar) has barely been used outside Japan and it would currently tie an operator to Intel-based hardware. Although Symphony has announced a collaboration with Qualcomm, which is providing chips and software as an Intel alternative, commercial products have yet to appear.

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— Iain Morris, International Editor, Light Reading