Kevin Gray:
All right. Hi, my name's Kevin Gray, publisher of Fierce Wireless, and I'm here today with Patrick Lopez, the Global VP of Product Management for 5G at NEC. Patrick, thanks for joining me here today.
Patrick Lopez:
Thanks for having me, Kevin. Thanks to the whole team for producing this segment.
Kevin Gray:
Yeah, no problem. All right, let's go ahead and dive right into it here. So NEC's been around for years. It's a massive company, but only recently started really providing that full end-to-end 5G solution set outside of Japan. So why now? What is the impetus for this change?
Patrick Lopez:
Probably, seven years ago or eight, there has been a new network evolution that has started, which is the transition towards open and disaggregated networks. And NEC has been one of the pioneers in that field with probably the world's first SDN controller, that's on OpenFlow, deployed commercially. And that trend has amplified, and the latest situation or example of it is really Open RAN. NTT DOCOMO was one of the pioneers of Open RAN, deploying the first Open RAN networks, commercially at scale with NEC radios and then Rakuten Mobile deployed the world's first Open RAN, massive MIMO radios with NEC again. And we found out that those network elements actually are not specific to Japan. And as we got more and more requests outside of Japan to basically provide those products, we found out that they're widely applicable to all the markets and 5G basically in Japan is same as we were.
Patrick Lopez:
Not only Open RAN, we have announced just last week at Mobile Congress, the availability of our 5G, 4G Converged Core product that also is deployed in Rakuten Mobile, as well as NTT DOCOMO and that as well is a product that is completely open and disaggregated in the way that is cloud native. And that is applicable for all international markets. So to answer your question, Kevin, I think just because networks have evolved towards open and disaggregation and also because 5G networks are more cloud native, this has created the impetus and, let's say the opportunity for NEC to commercialize its technologies and products outside of Japan.
Kevin Gray:
Great. Okay. So that sets me up nicely for my next question, right? So I think you're going to have a really unique perspective to this. First off, obviously, NEC was involved in the Rakuten Mobile project out there, as you know, they're one of the big leaders in Open RAN, of course. And second, you have this background in the industry working for operators like Telefónica, right? So, love to hear your perspective on this. What do you think are the advantages to operators, of moving to Open RAN based on all that experience?
Patrick Lopez:
Open RAN provides opportunity to design networks differently. Whereas in the past, because networks were vertical and consisted of appliances that had the software embedded with the appliance. Basically you didn't have much flexibility in the way to deploy those networks and where to deploy those networks. So for instance, most network operators, of a large country would traditionally select maybe two providers, and have one manage the east and the other one, the west or the north and the south, whichever way you wanted to split the network. But basically each network was kind of separate, its own technological island. And each vendor was providing a series of products that were, fairly rigid in the way they were deployed and the use case that they're enabled. And when we're talking about use cases, that's really what Open RAN promises. The promise of 5G is that operators will be able to create distinct connectivity services for enterprise, for verticals, for industries.
Patrick Lopez:
And it means that one size fits all doesn't work anymore, which was, before all the connectivity services were the same for everybody, whether you're a consumer, whether you're an enterprise, whether you are in telematics or banking or construction, basically the network was the same for everyone. Now with 5G, if you want to create specific connectivity products with specific attributes, for different use cases, different geographies, you need to be able to pick and choose vendors and to pick and choose different configurations. And that is what Open RAN brings to the table. Basically the RAN itself is broken in different components. Each component can be provided by different vendors. They are open interfaces and API between each of those components. And you can assemble network in a much more flexible, but also much more purposeful way, because you will understand that you will need different type of experience and connectivity for let's say, connected cars that you might need for healthcare industry.
Kevin Gray:
Great. So next question that I have for you, kind of piggybacking on that one. There's a lot of vendors that are getting into the gold rush of this Open RAN movement, right. But I want to ask you this next question, particular, as it relates to NEC, how is NEC uniquely capable of helping operators gain these advantages, especially in terms of system integration.
Patrick Lopez:
There's a range of benefits that NEC brings to the table. System integration certainly is one of them in the sense that we're not only a product company, we're also an SI and a very specific SI in the sense that we're an SI really geared towards telecom networks. So we're not going to do generic IT SI deployments, but we have a very strong and deep understanding of connectivity from the access to transport the core and the SMO perspective. We're able to assemble networks end to end and manage them end to end. The second part is that we will find NEC products probably in most, if not every domain or category of 5G, but that's not all, we believe that in order to realize the promise you need to be radically open, which means that you need to be able to enable an ecosystem where you will find, besides our products or products from partners, but also products from competitors that we assemble, that we integrate and that we deploy end to end for our customers.
Patrick Lopez:
And we think that's what the market demands. Market demands choice, market demands capability to have multi-vendor environments, but also the third component of this equation is that you shouldn't have to make compromise. And we think that we have demonstrated that you can deploy Open RAN networks, that you can deploy power core without making a compromise either in term of performance security or multi-vendor environment. And this is the NEC brand promise here. So we're introducing NEC open networks, which is basically a moniker to illustrate the fact that NEC will commit to deliver true multi-vendor environment, truly open, but if you can swap vendors and solutions within each category, and we will guarantee the end to end performance and stability of the system all the way to the level that you use to from the NEC brand.
Kevin Gray:
Okay, great. The integration piece is really so important and especially hearing you talk about it like that. Okay. So I have time for one more question here, and we're going to shift it just specifically focus on the North American market, where there's a lot of interesting things happening right now, right? Given all the conversations you're having and your experience in this space, how do you feel the market is going to evolve here for Open RAN in North America?
Patrick Lopez:
Well, I think that the Open RAN market in North America is probably one of the markets that is the most promising, obviously the complexity of deploying with large land mass, and a lot of different variations in term of different bands, end up basically requiring more integration and more adaptation. And that's why I think most network operators in North America have been working on Open RAN, but haven't launched or announced their progress in that field as much as we have seen in Japan, and in Western Europe. But it's coming, there is activity. We cannot talk about all the activities that we involved there, but what we can say, at least, is that you have seen in the last PlugFest from the TIP and O-RAN Alliance, that NEC was the only one vendor that had deployed MIMO radios integrated with the most vendors in that space. And that was demonstrated in a number of locations around the world, and one of them was at the TIP lab. And that was a PlugFest that was sponsored by Verizon. So they will see some announcements coming soon in that matter in north America.
Kevin Gray:
Great. So, to some that up, lots of activity right now, maybe a lot of it's not being talked about, but is one of the most promising markets worldwide. That's really exciting to hear. Okay, Patrick, that is all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much for joining us and hopefully you'll be able to join us again soon.
Patrick Lopez:
Thanks for having me talk soon. Bye Kevin.