Netrounds announced it will deploy its automated active service assurance solution in Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native network across Japan. The solution helps Rakuten Mobile to guarantee quality of services with cost-efficient network operations.

Rakuten Mobile, Japan’s newest network operator, has leveraged its expertise in virtualization and container technologies to build a revolutionary mobile network architecture that is fully virtualized, automated and 5G-ready.

You may recall, the company purchased Amazon competitor Buy.com many years back and eventually renamed it to Rakuten. They are currently differentiating this ecommerce offering via cash-back on purchases.

For the record, we think it was a tragic mistake to rename Buy.com to Rakuten but we digress.

Rakuten Mobile selected a few strategic software vendors to build a true end-to-end, cloud-native network in less than 12 months. Netrounds, with its programmable active testing and assurance solution, allows Rakuten Mobile to automate service assurance processes through the entire service lifecycle, from service activation testing and continuous active monitoring, to automated troubleshooting.

“We have been preaching automated active assurance since 2015, and it is a true honor for Netrounds to take a critical role in assuring the quality in the world’s most advanced and modern network at Rakuten Mobile,” said Mats Nordlund, CEO & Co-Founder, Netrounds. “Rakuten Mobile’s choice demonstrates that our software platform handles the scale, and meets the requirements, for emerging virtualized and programmable networks, such as 5G.”

We had an exclusive interview with Mats in September where we discussed the company’s survey on network brownouts.

We asked about how AIOps differs from what they do and they explained they can integrate with AIOps – the difference being, their solution allows the understanding of problems from the user’s perspective, which may not be understandable from the AIOps dashboard and alerting system. Netrounds partners with Moogsoft on AIOps.

“The part that the industry is missing is really understanding the network by sending traffic through it and knowing how service would perform if users are on it,” said Cyril Doussau, VP Marketing. He continued, “User perspective is what we give you.”

Netrounds software-only solution is well-aligned with Rakuten Mobile’s telco cloud initiatives as it delivers:

• Zero-touch execution of testing, monitoring and troubleshooting of network services.
• Multi-domain traffic generation that mimics the behavior of customers.
• Lightweight, software-based Test Agents covering all domains from the network edge to the cloud.
• Fully automated and orchestrated solution allowing deployments at scale.

With Netrounds, Rakuten Mobile will be able to:

• Ensure that the mobile backhaul performs optimally all the way from the central data centers to the radio sites.
• Isolate problems on the data plane path across the mobile backhaul for quick problem resolution.
• Deliver a perfect handover experience by measuring inter-data-center performance.

“We are pleased to leverage Netrounds’ technology to help us automate the service assurance process which guarantees our customers’ quality of experience,” said Tareq Amin, Chief Technology Officer, Rakuten Mobile.

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