Overview
- NEC Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
- Offices and R&D locations:
- India (Open RAN lab),
- EMEA (Transport network COE),
- LATAM (Transport network COE),
- UK (Open RAN COE),
- US (Open RAN and business development)
- Founded: 1899
- Key personnel: Atsuo Kawamura (Executive Vice President and President of Networks Business Unit)
- Market: Open Radio access network(Open RAN)
- Key proposition: Massive MIMO radio units and system integration
- Employees: 114,714 (as of March 2021)
- Market cap/valuation: more than $10.0 billion
Market Context
Journey to Open RAN
- 2019 – Provision of small cell Radio Units (RU) in partnership with Docomo.
- 2020 – The production of 5th generation Radio Units (RU) with MIMO antenna at the NEC manufacturing plant in Fukushima partnered with Rakuten.
- 2021 — NEC announced new Radio Units compatible with the following;
- n77
- n78
- and C-Band 3.7GHz frequency band (3.3-4.2GHz).
- All of it was to be made available globally from 2022. Also, in partnership with Samsung, NEC developed a new baseband unit (5G-CU/DU).
- 2022 — To expand its regional coverage, customer support capabilities, and assets in North America, NEC acquired Blue Danube. Its 5G products would enhance the capabilities of NEC and help them meet growing market demands.
- NEC recently announced 18 new O-RAN radios of different configurations (4T4R, 8T8R, 32T32R, 64T64R) to strengthen its existing leading portfolio of Massive MIMO radio units.
Product portfolio
NEC has a comprehensive Open RAN compliant product portfolio, where its hardware products include remote radio units that span across various configurations. Also, NEC is constantly upgrading and expanding to meet customer demands.
Netcracker, a subsidiary of NEC, also provides automation and orchestration solutions across different domains (RAN, Transport, and Core). In addition, this subsidiary also helps them become a prime system integrator for many operator trials and deployments of Open RAN network architecture.
*NEC is developing its software capabilities in partnership with other leading vendors and operators:
– Qualcomm Technologies and NEC Corporation announced a strategic collaboration. They are partnering to develop a 5G open and virtualised distributed unit (DU) powered by the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card.
– NEC collaborated with Docomo to advance the Non-Real Time Radio Intelligence Controller deployment.
R&D
NEC has been expanding its R&D capabilities in the Open RAN domain in the last few years.
By the end of 2020, NEC announced its Open RAN laboratory in India to complement its Center of Excellence Unit in the UK. The facility will accelerate the development of the 5G open ecosystem by NEC. NEC will accomplish this through pre-integrating partner Open RAN components to form end-to-end commercial-ready solutions. The addition of these centres makes the total R&D locations count to 7, spanning across countries, with India and Japan focusing on the development and production of Open RAN products.
Approach and go to market
Partner ecosystem
Deployments and trials
| Rakuten – NEC jointly developed Massive MIMO radio units with Rakuten, which played an essential role in the commercial deployment of Rakuten’s fully virtualised cloud-native mobile network. In addition, they also collaborated on BSS (Business Support System) and OSS (Operations Support System) solutions for the Rakuten’s 4G network operations Deutsche Telekom – NEC and Mavenir have collaborated to participate in the live 5G open RAN deployment in Germany for Deutsche Telekom. The deployment is in Neubrandenburg, a town north of Berlin, where NEC provides its 5G Massive MIMO radio units and Mavenir its CU/DU software. NTT Docomo – Provision of small cell radio units for 5G base station equipment to NTT Docomo. Vodafone UK – NEC has become one of the critical partners for Vodafone in the Open RAN deployment in the UK. NEC would be supplying 5G massive MIMO radio units in partnership with Samsung for the operator in its plan of 2500 sites committed in the UK. Telefonica – NEC is a prime system integrator of Telefonica’s pre-commercial trials for the four core global markets- Spain, Germany, the UK, and Brazil. Under the agreement, NEC will conduct multi-vendor trials of Open RAN solutions, including its own 5G massive MIMO radio units. Vodafone Ziggo – Conducted successful trials with NEC and Altiostar in the Netherlands. During the trials, products from different vendors were integrated to transform the network into a software-based deployment. Etisalat (UAE)- Open vRAN deployment in partnership with Altiostar, NEC, and Cisco. |
Why NEC is an important player
- NEC’s extensive and expanding product portfolio, with the added advantage of the capabilities of system integration, automation, and orchestration solutions through its subsidiary Netcracker, makes them one of the leading players in the Open RAN domain.
- NEC has been developing its R&D capabilities across regions. The vendor now focuses on expanding its portfolio from hardware to high margin software solutions, and vital investments & partnerships are thus taking place.
- NEC has been a prominent vendor amongst brownfield network deployments worldwide for Open RAN. In addition, it has partnered with the leading Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) for its Massive MIMO radios and system integration capabilities.
- NEC has extended its ecosystem of partners for Open RAN interoperability testing and is continuously collaborating with global players to become a leading player.
- The acquisition of Blue Danube, diversification into software solutions, continuous aggressive investments and market expansion across different regions makes NEC one of the dominant players in the Open RAN landscape, intending to compete against the traditional vendors.
Read our report on Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, and Altiostar to see how NEC is positioning itself in this ecosystem.