TMN is proud to announce the launch of The Future Telco – a partnership between TMN and Rakuten Symphony.
The series will feature:
- A special, in-depth report written by TMN that will explore and outline how telcos can adopt a use-case driven, single platform approach to enable the adoption of automation, AI and ML technologies – changing their business outcomes.
- A video interview series with subject matter experts, exploring advances in Rakuten Symphony’s platform and products approach, and customer results.
- Three dedicated case studies published in 2025 showcasing how mobile network operators have achieved real-world transformation of operational processes.
We’ll look at how the need for operational change challenges current structures and modes of thinking and delivery. The Series will outline how Rakuten Symphony structures and delivers a new operational environment via its use-case driven approach. Importantly, it will deliver real-world outcomes and experiences of operators who are making steps down this path.
Two products, one platform, and the need for change
As we launch a new series on the Future Telco, our aim is to document and tell the story of how Rakuten Symphony is already driving operational change for its customers, showing the industry that there is a way to change their business outcomes by adopting a new approach to their operations.
What do we mean by operations? We mean the whole process of designing, deploying, verifying and then running a network. That includes planning, updates, changes, upgrades, swap outs, extensions, service and performance assurance, element management, fault management, inventory. In short, it’s the long catalogue of processes that we know and perhaps even love-to-hate as OSS-BSS. These are the modules that operators integrate vertically with their network domains and services, and with which they then have to wrestle as they look to introduce revenue-raising capabilities such as slice management, SLA assurance or programmable, open interfaces. These are the tools which they need to expensively upgrade, integrate or bypass as they target new operational models based on technology enablers such as cloud-native architectures, automation, AI Ops and Gen AI.
This Series isn’t a stale, heard-it-all-before challenge that is long on diagnoses and short on cures.
But wait. This Series isn’t a stale, heard-it-all-before challenge that is long on diagnoses and short on cures. We’re not (only) here to score the easy win of castigating telcos for their lack of ambition, innovation and desire for change. The problems that telcos face are well-understood – they need to save money by being more efficient, get more flexible and agile, and then as a result make more money at better margin. Accordingly, transformation projects are nothing new. Workflows have been automated within many domains. AI use cases are widely and increasingly being developed and adopted. Gen AI has rocketed into the framework, offering the promise of operating and interrogating a network using natural language queries, and the vision of creating an AI Ops model for the network.
So what is the need, right now, to talk about a new approach to telco ops?
This series is going to be about how to change outcomes, with reference to how Rakuten Symphony has done it for its customers, which include its stable-mate Rakuten Mobile, where it cut its teeth, but also the likes of AT&T, where its software is gaining an increasingly strong foothold within the operator, as well as Dish Networks (now Boost Mobile), and 1&1, where it has supported complete rollout and operations of the greenfield new entrant.
Rakuten Symphony talks about One Platform, Two Products. Yes, two products. What’s that about?
What’s surprising about Rakuten Symphony, what we’re going to learn through the Series, is that it comes to all of this with a radically different position from other OSS-BSS companies. It doesn’t point at a catalogue of products that can address every bit of the journey and domain, and which then squat across any roadmap like toll-gates, demanding money for entrance.
Instead, Rakuten Symphony talks about One Platform, Two Products. Yes, two products. What’s that about?
Rakuten Symphony’s core insights were initially driven by its role as the OSS provider within Rakuten Mobile. As Rakuten Mobile deployed, it created its own telco ops framework – service management, workflow engine, fault management, observability, cloud orchestration, Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) platform, and so on – tens of different applications.
With this framework it achieved a zero touch provisioning operations model, built internally. At its core was a platform that acted as an internal automation company within the operator, and which enabled it to build 70-80% of its software in-house.
That platform-first, use-case development approach contrasts with the historical telco industry approach to solving operational requirements, which is to use the standards process to reach for technology specifications – creating one more domain brain or function to deal with each time.
It seems a bit too good to be true. Build use cases that leverage a common platform, and the rest will follow
So how do telcos act like that? Where do you, as a telco, begin to make those changes?
Because it seems a bit too good to be true. Build use cases that leverage a common platform, and the rest will follow. Especially when customers already have their existing OSS, BSS and other applications, not to mention live services and customers.
Rakuten Symphony’s approach was to build its platform, and from that create products that telcos will understand. The platform will sit side-by-side with existing telco OSS-BSS dashboards. The operator can run some use cases. When it is comfortable it might swap over a domain to the new platform. That’s a path to transformation and scale that AT&T, for example, has already outlined.
Oh. And those two products? The first was Site Manager: how do you build a network and how do you retire your old technology and applications? The second was Service Orchestration: how do you do zero touch provisioning?
Both these products leverage the capabilities of the underlying platform, real-time observability and data integration that creates data marts for Machine Learning engines, AI Ops, or automated intelligent controllers. From this platform, Symphony created a own unified AI agent, as well as capabilities such as orchestration and slice management, which it can now expose to any customer just as a software update.
That’s what this Future Telco Series is about – tracking and showing how the platform capabilities and AI-driven use cases can be scaled, combined and leveraged, to deliver much better financial outcomes for mobile operators.
You can register now to receive your copy of the Future Telco Report, which will tell you more in depth about Rakuten Symphony’s capabilities, and expose real results from its customers. Just fill in the form below and we’ll send you a copy on publication in February.
Please note, we will only send Report copies to valid work email addresses.
