Opensignal Japan Mobile Network Experience Report: Rakuten Mobile wins in Voice App and Upload Speed Experience
This month, Rakuten Mobile celebrated its first anniversary as the newest mobile carrier in Japan. And over the past year, industry eyes from around the world have been on the operator’s fully virtualized cloud-native network to see how the revolutionary architecture actually performs.
Rakuten Mobile’s winning technology
In March, Opensignal, the independent global standard for analyzing consumer mobile experience, announced its Global Mobile Network Experience Awards 2021 results and named Rakuten Mobile a global leader for 4G Availability and Voice App Experience. And today, Opensignal released the results of its Mobile Network Experience Report April 2021 for Japan, naming Rakuten Mobile as a winner in two categories.
Voice App Experience
Rakuten Mobile was named Japan’s winner for Voice App Experience with a score of 83.1. Opensignal’s Voice App Experience measures the quality of experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services—for example mobile voice apps such as Rakuten Viber, LINE, WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook Messenger etc.—using a model derived from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-based approach for quantifying overall voice call quality and a series of calibrated technical parameters. This model characterizes the exact relationship between the technical measurements and perceived call quality.
Upload Speed Experience
Rakuten Mobile won the Upload Speed Experience award for the second time. Rakuten Mobile’s score of 11.6 Mbps came out nearly 2 Mbps faster than the second-place finisher.
“When we decided to take up the challenge of building the world’s first cloud-native open RAN mobile network, we had expectations that Rakuten Mobile would compete with Japan’s other network operators,” commented Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin. “But winning Opensignal awards for upload speed and voice app experience just one year from the full launch of our mobile network is beyond our expectations. I’m incredibly proud of the team at Rakuten Mobile for everything we’ve accomplished.”
Opensignal Mobile Network Experience Report April 2021 for Japan based on independent analysis of mobile measurements recorded during the period December 1, 2020 – February 28, 2021. © 2021 Opensignal Limited.
