Dish Network is adding Rakuten Symphony to its Operational Support Systems (OSS) vendor roster, turning to the company and its observability framework (OBF) to collect the telemetry data from all of Dish’s network functions, which Dish says will enable the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to operate and optimize Dish’s 5G network.
Dish said that Rakuten Symphony’s OBF “will bring even greater visibility into the performance and operations of the network’s cloud-native functions with near real-time results.” In addition to visibility, the data collected by the OBF will then be used to optimize the network through closed loop automation, the network operator added.
Rakuten Symphony, launched in August, targets the international telecom market with all of Rakuten’s products, services and solutions, including the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) and Open RAN software. The business group has acquired Altiostar and is working with German new market entrant 1&1 Drillisch to build Europe’s first fully virtualized, Open RAN mobile network.
Among those tools and services are service assurance solutions that were developed based on Rakuten’s experience in the Japanese market. Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin has described Japanese consumers as “quality-obsessed” and shared anecdotal stories about customers who experience a dropped call or otherwise sub-optimal network experience sharing their stories far and wide on social media. This led to the development of new service assurance tools that went from generalized customer experience measures to drilling down to “accurate empirical data” at an individual subscriber level.
Amin also told RCR Wireless News that Rakuten Symphony’s goal is to be a “platform partner” rather than a vendor. (Read more on Rakuten Symphony here.)
Dish previously announced that it also plans to rely on Spirent Communications for 5G network testing, and that the ability to heavily leverage virtualized, automated testing for network slicing and testing in parallel is key to its strategy.
