NEC Wins 2021 Leading Lights Award for ‘Best New 5G Core Product’ and ‘Best New Open RAN Product’

NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced that it has been named a winner in the Light Reading 2021 Leading Lights Awards program in the ‘Best New 5G Core Product’ for its cloud-native 4G/5G Converged Core and ‘Best NEW Open RAN Product’ category for its 5G massive MIMO radio units.

The Leading Lights is one of the telecom industry's most prestigious awards programs, recognizing top companies and executives for their outstanding achievements in next-generation communications technology, applications, services, strategies and innovations. The Leading Lights winners were announced during an online awards ceremony on October 8, 2021.

‘Best New 5G Core Product’ – NEC’s 4G/5G Converged Core
NEC is a pioneer in cloud-native 5G core (5GC), starting with the launch of several private 5G services using our 5GC SaaS on AWS, announcing commercial availability of the world’s first 5G cloud native mobile core (*) and its market-leading User Plane Function (UPF) performance at 640Gbps /server. With key highlights such as stateless, microservice-based cloud-native architecture, platform-agnostic operation, and high performance, NEC’s 5GC enables operators to benefit from shorter time to market, and immediate monetization through a variety of use cases (from B2C to B2X). 5GC can be deployed from micro private instances on a single server to macro multi million users on clouds in a variety of scenarios, from on-premise COTS servers, to private, public or hybrid cloud environments.

‘Best New Open RAN Product’ – NEC’s 5G Radio Unit (RU)
NEC is the first and only massive MIMO (mMIMO) Open RAN RU vendor commercially deployed at scale in dense, urban environments (*). This signature product line announced for commercial general availability this year featuring advanced digital beamforming brings dramatic capacity while preserving open and flexible deployment options afforded by Open RAN. Our 5G massive MIMO radio units have recently been selected by Vodafone for implementation, as well as Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom for live network integration trials.

"Congratulations to NEC for being selected as a Leading Lights winner," said Light Reading Editor-in-Chief Phil Harvey. "The award demonstrates that NEC not only had a great year, but is on a trajectory to continue to make a difference in the global communications industry. We look forward to seeing what they do next."

"We are grateful to Light Reading for recognizing NEC’s 4G/5G Cloud-Native Converged Core and Open RAN 5G massive MIMO RUs as leading products in the industry," commented Patrick Lopez, Global VP of Product Management for 5G Products, NEC. "NEC is a pioneer and leader in developing end-to-end Open 5G solutions which bring tremendous value and innovation to the market. As an industry trailblazer of Open 5G, NEC is keen to continue its investment and to drive the next generation networks across the world."

Light Reading's reputation for fiercely independent analysis of the people, products and companies it covers makes this among the most credible and authoritative awards programs in the industry. Leading Lights judging was conducted by Light Reading's editors with input from the analyst team at Heavy Reading. (http://www.heavyreading.com). For a full list of winners, read Light Reading's blog here.

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