Japanese company NEC announced the establishment of its Global Open RAN Center of Excellence (CoE) in the U.K. to accelerate the global adoption of Open RAN.
In a release, NEC also said that the new facility has the aim of further strengthening the company’s structure for accelerating the global deployment of 5G.
This new CoE is responsible for business and solution development, product development support, project execution and technical support for NEC’s global Open RAN business.
The new center will help communication service providers (CSP) introduce Open RAN worldwide through its knowledge of wireless technology and NFV businesses, as well as NEC’s experience in supporting large scale Open RAN commercial deployment in Japan, the company said, adding that the center will also form the backbone of NEC’s global project delivery capability.
NEC is also planning to bolster and scale the center’s work via an Open RAN Laboratory based in India, which it said will be a technical verification facility and will be responsible for building up Open RAN ecosystems with interoperability validation in a multi-vendor environment, as well as verifying product and system level performance and quality assurance.
With this approach, NEC will drive initiatives to promote openness of networks at full scale through an Open RAN ecosystem that includes its own product portfolio as well as the products of partner companies. NEC said it will further leverage the CoE to strengthen collaboration with partner companies to contribute to revitalizing the global Open RAN market and transforming CSPs into digital service providers.
“Our customers expect commercial grade quality and operational readiness to underpin the deployment of Open RAN technology in their networks,” said Atsuo Kawamura, executive vice president and president of the Network Services Business Unit at NEC. “NEC will be a strategic partner to our customers in making that happen through our technology leadership, R&D capability as a RAN product vendor ourselves, and operational experience we have gained through generations of RAN deployment.”
Last month, NEC and global high-performance analog technology company Analog Devices (ADI) announced a partnership to design a 5G Network Massive MIMO antenna radio unit for Japanese telco Rakuten Mobile.
The radio unit adopts ADI’s fourth-generation wideband RF transceiver solution to achieve high-precision Massive MIMO and possesses a 5G open vRAN (virtual RAN) interface corresponding to Rakuten Mobile’s end-to-end fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network.
The radio unit also delivers large capacity transmission with high efficiency by using 3.7GHz frequency Massive MIMO and digital beamforming technology, the two companies said.
