Rakuten and Kyivstar are running a live Open RAN field test across Ukraine, one of the more demanding proving grounds for the disaggregated radio access architecture that the industry has been wrestling with for half a decade.

What's actually being tested?

Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest mobile operator, is hosting the trial on its commercial network. Rakuten, the Japanese internet conglomerate behind one of the world's most-watched greenfield Open RAN builds, supplies the radio stack. A field test, unlike a lab demo, runs real traffic over real towers — and in Ukraine that means real wartime conditions neither side has spelled out.

Neither company has published the site count, the spectrum band or the trial's expected length. Early-stage pilots usually keep the spec sheet short for the same reason startups don't publish crash rates: nobody wants competitors quoting their worst day back at them.

Why Ukraine, of all places?

Kyivstar's parent, Amsterdam-listed VEON, has publicly committed to Open RAN across its footprint, which spans several emerging markets across Eastern Europe, Central Asia and South Asia. A working deployment in Ukraine therefore doubles as a stress test for those other rollouts. If the kit survives here, the slide deck writes itself elsewhere.

For Rakuten, the motivation is plainer still. The company has run a flagship Open RAN network in Japan since 2020, but converting that reference site into European or North American contracts has moved at a crawl. A live deployment that handles Ukrainian winters and Russian electronic warfare does more for a sales meeting than another glossy brochure.

What Open RAN actually changes

Open RAN replaces the single-vendor base station — historically a unit from Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei or Samsung — with radios, servers and software drawn from multiple suppliers, stitched together by open interfaces published by the O-RAN Alliance. The pitch is lower vendor lock-in and faster feature cycles. The catch, repeated in nearly every post-mortem so far, is integration cost, which routinely eats the headline savings.

The Japanese deployment has given Rakuten a credible reference site. Whether that experience, and the orchestration software behind it, transplants cleanly into a different regulatory, climate and power environment is, in fairness, what every Open RAN trial exists to answer.

A quiet political dimension

Western governments have spent the past two years framing Open RAN as a route to diversify away from Chinese vendors in 5G networks. Ukraine, while not an EU member state, sits inside that policy conversation. A working Ukrainian deployment is, in that framing, a data point with geopolitical weight alongside the commercial ones.

VEON, like several other operators with Russian-exposed footprints, has had to rebuild parts of its network under live pressure since 2022. Open RAN vendors, including Rakuten, have made clear they want a share of that replacement spend.

What to watch next

Field tests typically run six to nine months before either side commits to a commercial rollout or quietly shelves the project. Kyivstar and Rakuten have not named a decision date, an expansion plan or even the next press window.

If the trial clears its milestones, expect VEON to hold it up as a template for the rest of its markets. If it stumbles, expect a press release shorter than this paragraph.