NEC MWC 21 Headlines

Whether you were unable to physically go to Mobile World Congress, or were too busy to catch all the announcements, I figured I would put together a brief overview of what we announced this year.

This is also an excellent explanation for those who have been asking what decided me to come work for NEC. If you read the following, I think you will get a good idea.

Besides working with amazing teams and very smart people, what drawn me to NEC is the continuation of innovation and deployment of open and disaggregated networks I started as an independent analyst at {Core Analysis}, as an executive at Telefonica and as an advisor at Bell Canada.

Our first big announcement was from Vodafone UK, selecting NEC for deployment of our 5G Massive MIMO radio units in the UK. It was promptly followed by Deutsche Telekom announcing NEC 5G open RAN mMIMO in Germany. NEC is proving once again its market leadership in Open RAN with the deployment of Radio Units in dense urban environments at commercial scale. Many vendors have massive MIMO technology, some vendors are Open RAN, we are the first and the only one to have deployed massive MIMO Open RAN in urban networks. This will change and we welcome the competition for this market to grow.

As Open RAN becomes mainstream, the opportunity for cost savings and new savings relies on the optimization of virtual resources. This selection of NEC by NTT DOCOMO to develop their Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) is another testament of our innovation and pioneering spirit.

To grow, the Open RAN market needs many different configurations, to offer connectivity products for all kinds of environments (public, private, urban, rural, industrial, government...). We did our part announcing 3 new massive MIMO open RAN RUs.

NEC is focusing on providing RUs that are high performance high quality and completely open. We share this philosophy with MTI and that is why we are proud to have announced a strategic partnership with them.

The other important part of Open RAN is the software. NEC has been recognized as a leading solutions integrator of third parties in that space and will continue to do so, but in complement has announced the launch of of its own cloud native high performance open RAN software offering. 5G success depends on a rich ecosystem and an abundance of vendors.

Shifting from Open RAN, 5G's success will be realized through the capacity to create connectivity products that are adapted to the different use cases. A key element for this a core network that is cloud native, capable of being deployed in public or private clouds and that is blazingly fast. We are proud to announce the world fastest 5G Core network deployed in Rakuten's mobile network, in collaboration with Intel. At the same time, we showed off our deployment together with Netcracker on AWS cloud.

Private and enterprise networks are an important part of 5G and we announced our collaboration with NTT data to promote solutions to accelerate its adoption.

By now, you probably understand why I am so humbled to have been invited to join NEC and to support all these products and teams. It is a great privilege to be able to continue contributing to an open, disaggregated, high performance 5G. More to come soon, stay tuned!