The Immediate Impact of Open Networking — The Rakuten Use Case

Author: Amir Elbaz, CEO & Founder, Beyond Networks; Brijesh, Rakuten Mobile Collection: 2025-OCP-Global-Summit-Networking

Summary

Rakuten Mobile — the Telco division of the Japanese Rakuten Group — executed a three-phase proof-of-concept of open networking for its data center infrastructure in 2025, driven by power constraints, space limitations, subscriber growth, and a desire to reduce vendor lock-in. Rakuten is already one of the world's most cloud-native mobile operators: it launched Japan's first end-to-end cloud-native 4G/5G network in 2020, running 99% of applications on cloud (Kubernetes-based), and by 2025 had ~10 million subscribers with industry-leading KPIs. The open networking PoC was conducted during its migration from OpenStack to a full Kubernetes-based cloud platform.

The three-phase PoC progressed from manual hardware testing (Phase 1, Edgecore whitebox + SONiC) to automated zero-touch provisioning with Verity orchestration and observability (Phase 2, Edgecore + SONiC + Beyond Networks Verity) to a near-production multi-vendor deployment (Phase 3, Dell + Broadcom Tomahawk 5 + SONiC + Verity) with the same use cases as their production network. Key result: 50–58% cost savings over incumbent networking (corroborated by Gartner market research projecting $5B open networking market), 1-hour deployment time for underlay and overlay in the pre-production setup, and successful feature parity testing (RoCEv2, lossless Ethernet, 800G/400G ports). Remaining challenges: day-2 operational complexity, multi-interface management, firmware/NOS lifecycle management, and the absence of production-grade Telco-specific references.