The network was interrupted for 30 minutes! Operator: Please restart your phone

At 1:50 p.m. local time on March 29, Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile suffered a sudden network failure, causing some customers to be unable to make calls and access the Internet.

After the accident, some mobile phones on Rakuten Mobile's network showed "out of circle", which means they were out of service area and had no signal. Many users complained on social networks that they could not access the Internet, could not complete mobile payments, and even missed interview calls.

At 2:50 p.m., Rakuten Mobile issued a network failure notice, stating that the failure was restored at 2:20 p.m. and the cause of the failure was "system failure." Users were informed that if they still could not access the Internet, please restart their phones or turn on or off airplane mode.

Although the outage lasted only 30 minutes, it had a significant impact because it occurred during the day. At the same time, considering that Rakuten Mobile, as a fully virtualized mobile network operator, has been touting the advantages of its fully automated network operations, this accident has attracted industry attention.

At the Mobile World Congress held not long ago, Rakuten Mobile stated that it has built an end-to-end fully virtualized mobile communications network in Japan with more than 200,000 base station cells and a population coverage rate of 96%, realizing the migration of wireless access networks from a black box architecture to a world where everything is driven by software.

It also emphasized that the biggest advantage of this fully virtualized mobile network is that it realizes automated management of the entire process of planning, construction, maintenance, optimization and operation, reducing operating costs by 30% compared with traditional mobile networks.

In order to sell its fully virtualized mobile network solution to other operators around the world, Rakuten Mobile also demonstrated and launched the "commercially proven" automated network management tool - Symworld at the Mobile World Congress.

Rakuten Mobile claims that Symworld is a SaaS tool built on AI and cloud platform, which can realize end-to-end automated and intelligent network operations from virtualized RAN, core cloud to edge cloud. Its highlights include:

• Zero-touch network configuration can be achieved at scale, reducing site commissioning time from weeks to minutes, enabling rapid network deployment at 40% lower CAPEX costs than traditional mobile networks.
• Through fully automated tools and processes, operating costs can be reduced by 30% compared to traditional mobile networks.
• The speed of introducing new network functions can be increased by 10-15 times.

Under the fully virtualized network architecture of Lotte Mobile, network functions are mainly run on general servers and deployed in edge data centers. In the on-site demonstration, Lotte Mobile technicians used a laptop to remotely log in to the Symworld platform. Through this tool, they can view the server rack layout in real time; quickly add equipment and upgrade network functions through templates; view the geographical distribution, site information and operating status of base stations; and view network performance such as site alarms, faults, cell KPI indicators, CPU usage, etc. in real time. If there are abnormal situations such as network connection interruption, they can quickly migrate or install new virtual machines to restore the fault.

At the meeting, Rakuten Mobile CTO also said that Japanese users have high requirements for network service quality. If there is a problem with the network, users will immediately complain on social platforms such as Twitter. For this reason, he also highlighted a unique feature of the tool - it can collect network comments and complaint information posted by users on social networks, and check network faults and optimize network configuration in real time based on this information.

The network outage occurred just one month after the grand Symworld demonstration. This makes people wonder whether the automated network management platform played an important role in the failure discovery and recovery process. Unfortunately, Rakuten Mobile did not give a detailed explanation of the cause of the failure and the means of recovery, but simply explained it as a "system failure."