Telecom is a complex business. And telecom has a love/hate relationship with complexity. Complexity that comes at a cost – in more systems, more people and skills, in training and re-training. The price of progress is high, and getting higher, as telcos struggle to both retain the knowledge required to run their older networks and hire the skills and expertise to run new ones. The effect of that is low investor confidence – in an industry that is fully understood as foundational to the modern world.

Appledore sees some evidence that this is changing. In particular, some in the industry are promoting simplification to the level of strategy. Specifically, an active effort to substantially reduce the count of ALL the systems used to plan, build, operate and assure networks – by changing the fundamental approach.

Simpler is better.

Rakuten has a history of challenging the accepted wisdom. Having rolled out a world-class network nationwide in just three years, based on a radically simpler alternative architecture to conventional networks, Rakuten is now challenging the conventional wisdom in OSS: that it must be complex. Sophisticated? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Complex? No. The Rakuten mantra is not to manage complexity, but instead to eliminate it. Simpler is better, faster, and cheaper.

This paper looks at the major changes Rakuten Symphony has made in its OSS business and proposition as it seeks to continue providing the industry with a visionary new alternative to decades of received wisdom. We explore where and how Rakuten has removed complexity from OSS – without losing capability. Its thinking about data, observability andAI is central to this new vision, in the way that hierarchies, standardised interfaces and inventory have been for conventional OSS.