India, April 8 -- It's here. After one or two extended deadlines, Rakuten Mobile, Japan's disruptive network play, gate-crashed Japan's 4G market today with what it claimed was a "full-scale commercial launch."

Rakuten Mobile wants to shake things up a little. On the back of what it says will be a super-lean cost base, counting operations staff in hundreds rather than thousands, Japan's newbie reckons it will have plenty of legroom to undercut the country's incumbent operations on pricing.

NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank will ruefully note that Rakuten Mobile is even more tariff-aggressive than was originally expected.

Referencing growing data demands "spurred by the recent expansion of telework and online education needs" ? read COVID-1...