Tokyo, February 22, 2022 - 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.