Rakuten Symphony has been selected for a grant from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for a project to strengthen Ukraine’s telecom infrastructure with virtualized Open RAN. The company said the grant sits under METI’s FY2024 supplementary budget subsidy program for future-oriented co-creation projects with the Global South, including support for Ukraine’s reconstruction and cooperation with Central and Eastern European countries.
The project will put a cloud-native Open RAN environment in Ukraine and include validation testing for flexible, cost-efficient networks. Rakuten Mobile will join as a key collaborating partner, while Rakuten Symphony said the work is part of a demonstration project awarded in the second round of grant applications.
Testing path around Kyiv and in the lab
Rakuten Symphony is already working with Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest telecommunications operator and a wholly owned subsidiary of VEON Ltd., on Open RAN deployment and demonstration tests in the country. In the first phase, the companies completed lab testing of Open RAN and cloud solutions in a 4G environment and validated key features and interoperability.
The second phase will extend the project to 4G and 5G configurations and include field tests. Open RAN 4G LTE field tests carrying commercial customers will take place around Kyiv in a live brownfield network, while 5G capabilities will be evaluated in a dedicated laboratory environment.
Brownfield replacement, not a greenfield trial
The deployment will evaluate distributed RAN and centralized RAN architectures as part of a modernization effort replacing legacy infrastructure. That keeps the project focused on operational change in an existing network rather than a clean-slate build.
Rakuten Symphony said the work is intended to support the construction and operation of flexible, cost-efficient networks and to help restore telecom infrastructure in Ukraine.
Budget and partner mix
Rakuten Symphony said the project is expected to cost about 710 million yen, with up to 350 million yen potentially covered by the METI subsidy. Rakuten Mobile’s role sits alongside the ongoing collaboration with Kyivstar, giving the project a three-party structure inside Rakuten’s broader Open RAN push.
Rakuten Symphony said it aims to use the Kyivstar partnership to validate stable network operations and establish a scalable business model for future commercial deployment.
Read for Open RAN suppliers
For Open RAN vendors and integrators, the signal is that Rakuten Symphony is pairing a government-backed grant with live brownfield testing, lab-based 5G evaluation, and a named operator partner in Ukraine. The project also ties Open RAN to both D-RAN and C-RAN validation, which is the part other suppliers will benchmark against.