NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701) introduces its open virtualized RAN software suite to the international market. NEC’s vCU/vDU software suite leverages the company’s long history of technological leadership and commitment to improving Open Radio Access Networks (RAN). NEC Open Networks is an ecosystem that provides operators with choice in every category with best-of-breed solutions and services from both NEC and its partners in Open RAN radio units, software, open transport, converged packet core, automation, and orchestration. NEC will continue integrating, commercializing, and deploying multiple ecosystem partners in this vRAN software suite to meet its customers’ needs.
Drawing on NEC’s deep experience as a global leader in telecommunications, NEC will integrate this software suite with its existing and new partners. This new vCU/vDU software suite guarantees seamless migration from 4G to 5G and beyond. It also ensures standards based interfaces for integration with ORAN Radio Units (O-RUs) and other components of the multi-vendor ecosystem. The virtualized CU/DU features pre-integrated NEC radio units, core, and transport blueprints, and is also certified with a range of third-party RUs, allowing quick time to market.
“NEC is committed to being radically open, allowing customers to select the best solutions for their needs,” said Patrick Lopez, NEC’s vice president of product management for 5G. “We’re giving our customers another option of a pre-integrated, automated vCU/vDU solution to define their RAN blueprints while benefiting from a virtualized Open RAN compliant system. The NEC OvRAN vCU/vDU software suite is built to bring operators into the cloud native world with no compromise on performance or quality.”
NEC’s cloud-native vCU/vDU software suite is fully open and automated for deployment and consolidated operation, supporting 3GPP and O-RAN interfaces on private and public cloud infrastructure. It leverages the benefits of cloud-native architecture, including horizontal and vertical scaling, auto-healing, and redundancy; and is architected for mobile network evolution, including the next-generation radio technologies (i.e., 5G-Advanced and 6G). The high-performance, power-efficient system enables flexible control over resource allocation in the RAN and is designed for easy integration with the O-RAN defined near-Real Time RAN Intelligent Controller. This allows the embedded vCU/vDU control logic with Artificial Intelligent (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to dynamically optimize RAN network performance.
NEC’s advanced, customizable Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) feature-set complements NEC’s OvRAN offering with the NEC RAN Domain Orchestrator Suite. Its support for open, standardized interfaces and integrated non-Real Time RIC platform means that it can host use-cases developed by 3rd party application ecosystem vendors. NEC is also developing high value-add RIC Apps to complement its OvRAN vCU/vDU software suite such as dynamic mMIMO (massive multiple-input and multiple-output) resource and power optimization.
About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation has established itself as a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies while promoting the brand statement of “Orchestrating a brighter world.” NEC enables businesses and communities to adapt to rapid changes taking place in both society and the market as it provides for the social values of safety, security, fairness and efficiency to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. For more information, visit NEC at https://www.nec.com.
NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced the general availability of its 4G/5G Converged Core. This award-winning, industry-leading high performance product can now be deployed for 4G and 5G in standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA) configurations. The NEC Converged Core uses a cloud-native, fully containerized microservice architecture and can be deployed in a traditional private core, on premise, or in the cloud via public cloud or hybrid scenarios.
NEC is leveraging its rich history of innovation in network architecture and telecommunications to lead our industry’s transition to Open RAN for 5G. NEC’s broad suite of solutions in this area is second to none, featuring disaggregated RAN components, xHaul transport, Core Networks, Operations Automation and Systems Integration Services. This suite of solutions is called NEC Open Networks. Wireless operators can rely on NEC Open Networks to realize the real-world benefits of truly open 5G networks — flexibility, improved speed of innovation and independence from proprietary solutions.
NEC is providing NEC Open Networks to address the challenges mobile network operators (MNO) have been facing in deploying 5G networks. One of the key issues MNOs have faced is the duplicated costs incurred to manage and operate both 4G EPC and 5G. The flexibility and innovation of the new Converged Core allows a smooth transition to 5G for MNO by enabling 4G EPC, 5G NSA and 5G SA deployments with the same product simultaneously.
NEC adopted container technology and microservices by redesigning the traditional monolithic EPC into a fully cloud-native architecture and converging it with 5GC to accommodate both 4G and 5G users under a single core. This unique architecture allows individual Network Functions (NF) to be deployed and scaled on-demand as needed, to natively support high performance, availability, scalability, resiliency and disaster recovery.
This unique architecture provides the added benefit of accelerating an MNOs digital transformation that will enable deployment of new, innovative, digital services.
NEC will be presenting its industry leading NEC Open Networks at MWC Barcelona 2022, at Fira Gran Via, Hall 2 2F10.
https://www.nec.com/en/event/mwc2022/
About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation has established itself as a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies while promoting the brand statement of “Orchestrating a brighter world.” NEC enables businesses and communities to adapt to rapid changes taking place in both society and the market as it provides for the social values of safety, security, fairness and efficiency to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. For more information, visit NEC at https://www.nec.com.
NEC Corporation announced today the launch of carrier-grade, cloud-native Open RAN software supporting its industry-leading digital beamforming of Massive MIMO (mMIMO). The solution will be available globally from the beginning of 2022.
5G Networks are increasingly adopting the cloud. The introduction of virtualization technologies in various layers of the network, from core to RAN, enables faster service provisioning and equipment cost reduction while shortening procurement lead times. Cloud-native architecture and operation allows network orchestration and automation at scale, thereby achieving improved service quality and reliability.
NEC’s cloud-native software delivers carrier-grade performance, cloud-grade scalability and cost effectiveness. To meet 5G’s high-speed, high-capacity requirements, it provides advanced control of full digital beamforming over 16 layers in downlink communications in systems where mMIMO is utilized. This implementation delivers large-capacity transmission as well as efficient and autonomous control depending on the service requirements and traffic conditions.
The solution fully supports O-RAN specifications and leverages the wide ecosystem of a variety of partners. This open RAN, cloud-native software is fully containerized and provides flexibility for deployment scenarios (on premises, private cloud, public cloud), geographies (urban, peri-urban, rural) and use cases (consumer, enterprise, government).
In addition to these products, NEC also offers a new windowRAN Domain Orchestration solution from its subsidiary Netcracker. The solution combines Netcracker’s industry-leading orchestration, OSS and analytics functions with NEC’s expertise in integrated network operation and management to fully automate all aspects of the RAN domain. The solution is based on Netcracker’s cloud-native Digital OSS (operation support system). It runs on any Kubernetes(2) cloud platform and is compliant with open APIs and standardization, enabling collaboration with a variety of products from different Open RAN vendors.
Patrick Lopez, Global VP Product management, 5G products at NEC commented: “We are continuing with our tradition of market-leading innovation. NEC was the first vendor to develop virtualization technologies for communications networks. We were the first company to commercialize Open Flow(3), SDN controllers(4) and NFV(5) as well as the pioneer vendor to provide virtualized core networks.
“Today, by introducing cloud-native virtualization to the RAN as well, NEC accelerates the migration toward next-generation networks and contributes to unlocking the full potential of 5G.”
(1) Technologies with advanced MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output). A technology that simultaneously improves the quality stability of spatial multiplexing and radio propagation paths by taking advantage of the freedom of a large number of independent transceivers. In 5G, it was developed and introduced aiming at further frequency utilization efficiency improvement by spatial multiplexing in addition to orthogonal frequency multiplexing and time division multiplexing of 4G. (2) Open source software that automates the deployment and scaling of containerized applications. (3) Network technology that enables centralized network control by separating network control functions from switches and aggregating them into controllers. (4) Software-Defined Networking: Concepts for software-controlled networking. (5) Network Function Virtualization: A technology that virtualizes various functions that make up a network, such as router functions and firewall functions, and realizes network functions on a general-purpose server without using dedicated hardware.
About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation has established itself as a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies while promoting the brand statement of “Orchestrating a brighter world.” NEC enables businesses and communities to adapt to rapid changes taking place in both society and the market as it provides for the social values of safety, security, fairness and efficiency to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. For more information, visit NEC at https://www.nec.com.
