NEC bags 'Magic Quadrant’ title for small cells

New Delhi: IT services provider NEC Corporation has been named a leader in the ‘Magic Quadrant for Small Cell Equipment 2014’ by analyst firm Gartner.

The research firm evaluates vendors on their completeness of vision and ability to execute.

NEC offers what it believes to be the broadest outdoor and indoor small cell solution portfolio. This includes consultancy, deployment and maintenance services to help operators boost mobile network capacity and coverage to minimize costs and enable the delivery of new value added services, a statement said. In the enterprise market, NEC offers small cells, managed by a compact server, to overcome this problem and provide reliable LTE, 3G and WiFi connectivity., which avoids the costly and time consuming installation of coaxial cable, specialist indoor radio planning and air conditioning units of competing Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS).

It provides a platform to overlay intelligent, cloud-based applications at the network edge, enabling the delivery of new converged IT and communications services. By integrating the small cell server with an enterprise’s existing on-premises or hosted unified communications and PBX solution, employees can use their smartphones like a desk phone with advanced functions such as hunt groups to route calls to an available team member, free internal transfers and least cost routing for international calls.

This platform can also be used to extend in-building employee presence and location-based messaging services to any smartphone or offer tiered Quality of Service levels for video or VoIP content. Martin Guthrie, Head of Business Development for Small Cells, NEC Europe, said: “NEC is making it possible to use small cells at the network edge as a service delivery platform that enables true fixed and wireless convergence. By adding network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) on top, it can become an even more flexible platform which is able to deliver new services in a new agile way.

Enterprises are able to leverage investments in their scalable, future-proof small cell platform to meet their users’ changing needs over time. While operators enjoy higher network utilisation rates and the ability to extend the range of innovative enterprise services they are able to offer.”