Why Rakuten Mobile Dropped Red Hat for Rocky Linux: Inside the Open RAN Shift

Rakuten, a Japanese e‑commerce and online retail company founded in 1997, also operates financial, digital content and communication services.

Rakuten Mobile’s CEO Tareq Amin announced that the company will remove Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from its mobile network platform in Japan, fully eliminating the software vendor.

The decision stems from the per‑CPU subscription model, which undermines Rakuten’s business model, and from a desire for a “truly” open‑source operating system.

I think nothing beats a community‑driven project; it changes the game. The subscription‑based charging structure is completely wrong, and I should not be forced to pay for it.

After dropping Red Hat, Rakuten will collaborate with Rocky Linux to run software workloads on its Open RAN distributed units. Rakuten Symphony, the hardware‑software‑services arm, will also offer the real‑time Rocky Linux OS to future customers.

With roughly 30,000 Open RAN devices, paying subscription fees per CPU would be prohibitively expensive, prompting the shift toward a genuine open‑source solution supported by the community.

To enable the partnership, Amin reached out to Gregory Kurtzer, founder of Rocky Linux, who created the project after Red Hat ended CentOS development in 2020. Both teams spent 13 months adjusting Rocky Linux to match Red Hat’s performance for large‑scale, real‑time mobile network deployments, and Rakuten contributed those adjustments back to the community.

Keeping those adjustments internal would be a huge mistake; feeding what we learned back to the Rocky Linux community helps the ecosystem grow.

Amin outlined a 12‑month strategy in Japan to migrate all RHEL workloads to Rakuten’s own cloud while deploying the new OS, emphasizing a careful, non‑disruptive transition for customers.

Related link: https://symphony.rakuten.com/newsroom/rakuten-symphony-and-ciq-bring-back-open-source-to-open-ran-deployments-with-rocky-linux