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The Japanese authorities granted this spectrum band to Rakuten Cellular in October 2023
Japanese telco Rakuten Cellular introduced that it’ll deploy base stations utilizing cell community radios developed by Nokia working within the 700 MHz band, often known as the “platinum band”, the telco stated in a launch.
The service famous that this spectrum band was allotted by Japan’s Ministry of Inner Affairs and Communications in October 2023, including that it expects to begin working base stations utilizing this frequency band quickly.
Through the use of a next-generation Distributed Unit (DU) developed by Rakuten Cellular subsidiary Rakuten Symphony, the Japanese telco stated it will likely be capable of simply deploy the radio in its virtualized, Open RAN community. Because of this, the newly deployed antenna suitable with 1.7 GHz band and 700 MHz band might be deployed alongside the present 1.7 GHz radios, permitting the bottom stations to function promptly through a software program replace.
The telco additionally highlighted that the “platinum band” has the distinctive means to take care of a powerful sign even within the presence of obstacles like buildings or when indoors. It added it goals to mix its allotted 700 MHz spectrum with its current 4G and 5G frequency bands and roaming, in addition to increasing the deployment of its platinum band beginning with city areas with a excessive quantity of customers and site visitors.
As well as, Rakuten Symphony will collaborate with Nokia to supply the radios to Rakuten Symphony clients in choose markets all over the world.
“Rakuten Cellular is thrilled to associate with Nokia to deploy platinum band providers throughout our nationwide community that can deliver even higher-quality cell service to our clients in Japan. We are going to proceed striving to supply high-quality cell providers to our clients,” stated Sharad Sriwastawa, Co-CEO of Rakuten Cellular.
“Using the 700 MHz band will enhance the person expertise, particularly indoors and our AirScale” portfolio can help community development throughout any frequency band,” stated Tommi Uitto, president of cell networks at Nokia.
Rakuten Cellular has reached over 6 million subscribers as of the top of December. The operator beforehand stated it anticipated to achieve 8-10 million cell subscribers by the top of 2024.
In the meantime, the telco’s community had 60,300 websites on the finish of the third quarter of the yr. The service ended Q3 with a 4G protection of 98.8% of Japan’s territory.
Rakuten Cellular not too long ago introduced plans to begin present satellite-to-mobile service in Japan in 2026 in partnership with AST SpaceMobile.
Rakuten Cellular stated that the precise timing of the initiation of any such service and the scope of such service is unsure and is topic to quite a lot of elements, together with these which can be outdoors of the management of Rakuten and AST SpaceMobile.
The businesses purpose to supply direct satellite-to-mobile providers that can be utilized not just for textual content messaging but additionally for broadband communication resembling voice and video calls on commercially accessible smartphones, the Japanese telco stated.
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