Japanese electronic commerce and online retailing company, Rakuten Group has recently acquired US mobile technology company Altiostar Networks for over $1 billion, plans to expand operations in India.

Altiostar network, which at present has over 500 engineers at its development centre in Bengaluru, is planning to triple its headcount in India over the next year. According to Srinivas Gudladana, head of India operations at Altiostar Networks, Altiostar built RAN (radio access network) will ground up from Bengaluru.

Gudladana said the company will focus on two strategic priorities — 5G protocols and virtualised services for the mobile industry. So far, India was the only development centre for the US-based network infrastructure major, but it now plans to hire aggressively in the UK.

RAN is part of a mobile telecom system and provides a connection between end devices and the core network. RAN, Gudladana said, consists of three main components — RU (radio unit), DU (distributed unit) and CU (central unit).

“The traditional architecture from the big telecom vendors had these components integrated and were deployed with custom hardware. Between 2012-2017, Altiostar did the first step of RAN disaggregation, by having CU on COTS (common off the shelf) hardware and virtualising CU,” Gudladana said.

According to Gudladana, similar Virtualised DU and CU have been deployed across Japan. “We revolutionised products on off-the-shelf hardware and created open interfaces. Virtualised DU and CU have been deployed across Japan, and now are going to other countries including India,” Gudladana said, who was also behind setting up the India centre.