Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten Mobile Network is launching a new mobile network in October this year. The company said that it has teamed up with Red Hat to build a flexible, scalable and cloud-native telecom network infrastructure to not only meet end-user needs but also keep operational costs low.

Rakuten Mobile Network plans to offer a range of consumer and commercial services, including consumer mobile broadband, 5G radio access (subject to government licensing approval), narrow Band-IoT, rich media like streaming video, and augmented and virtual reality.

Using Red Hat’s open source technologies, Rakuten is said to have built a network functions virtualization (NFV) cloud where network functions run in virtualized environments on general purpose servers rather than on specialized hardware and proprietary software.

Red Hat technologies underpinning this telecommunications cloud include: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage.