NEC is out to crash the Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia 5G party – Light Reading
The sunflower-yellow arm of an ordinary-looking excavator scoops dirt from the ground, swings 90 degrees and deposits the load. Nothing unusual, you think, until you peer into the cabin and notice the driver’s seat is empty.
The autonomous excavator is partly a showcase for NEC and its…….
The sunflower-yellow arm of an ordinary-looking excavator scoops dirt from the ground, swings 90 degrees and deposits the load. Nothing unusual, you think, until you peer into the cabin and notice the driver’s seat is empty.
The autonomous excavator is partly a showcase for NEC and its latest 5G goodies a standalone core that has apportioned a chunk of network capacity just for driverless digging. “This is what we feel is the future of 5G,” says Patrick Lopez, NECs Canada-based global vice president of 5G product management, in reference to 5G’s versatility. “With slicing and ultralow latency, we can detect in real time how much dirt is left in the pile.”
The Japanese technology firm had a relatively low telecom profile in the days of 4G rollout, when the industry coalesced around a few big Nordic and Chinese vendors. It hopes to change all that with the latest generation of mobile technology, smashing through the Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia oligopoly like a sumo wrestler through a shoji. “It is NEC’s ambition to be a large and leading telecom equipment maker globally,” says Lopez.
NEC boss Takayuki Morita aims to capture a fifth of the open RAN market by 2030.
(Source: NEC)
It has been energized by open RAN and sees that technology as a catalyst for its growth. With 4G, most operators bought the radio access network products for a given site from the same vendor’s system, partly because different suppliers were about as communicative as warring relatives. Open RAN’s new interfaces are designed as a corrective. Using them, an operator could, say, mix one vendor’s radio units with another’s baseband software. Specialists see it as the unlocking of the RAN opportunity. Operators hope it will spur competition.
NEC benefited from a head start in open RAN, having supplied open radio units to NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest operator, long before the concept took off globally. But the game changer came with Rakuten, a Japanese version of Amazon (albeit smaller) that decided to build a new mobile network entirely on open RAN principles. NEC was soon chosen to supply 5G radio units. More recently, it has secured the contract to provide Rakuten’s standalone 5G core.
Rakuten’s ability to run a functioning open RAN network in Tokyo without performance problems has been great publicity for NEC. Lopez can now list Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, Spain’s Telefnica and UK-headquartered Vodafone as triallists or full-blown customers. NEC, it is safe to say, has emerged as one of the initial winners of the open RAN movement. Its 5G business may be on the cusp of a boom.
Today, …….
