Cisco Systems, and NEC will jointly sell to support LTE networks under an agreement announced Tuesday.
Cisco ASR 5000 is the mobile packet core switch, and NEC will provide base stations for mobile data networks to broadband in the world. They analyzed the interoperability between products after extensive testing in the real world, the company said.
LTE (Long Term Evolution) is a great opportunity for the manufacturers of the two radio access networks and basic infrastructure that is behind them. The demand for mobile data services, the ability to grow rapidly in the coming years thanks to the wide application designed for mobile devices and services for them.
NEC, based in Tokyo, built the LTE network for Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo to support LTE, and has stations for carriers KDDI and Korea have participated in studies to SingTel and Telefonica.
The switch ASR 5000 is based on technology from Cisco through the acquisition of Starent Networks, acquired in 2009. It is equipped to carry traffic management, provision of services and other back-end tasks for 3G and 4G mobile, allowing carriers a smooth migration to 4G technologies, so Cisco.
Deal of the NEC is expected to help more than Cisco, NEC, because it is a relatively small player in the RAN (Radio Access Network) business outside of Japan, said analyst Daryl Schoolar of Current Analysis. More RAN vendors such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei Technologies will not need to make such agreements with Cisco, because they sell the mobile equipment Packet Core itself, he said.
Cisco competes with these companies and has been with many airlines on the strength of its existing switches back-end data networking and heritage, said Schoolar. The major airlines prefer to use several suppliers so they are not totally dependent on one supplier.
Update of 3G to 4G improves network performance and increases the speed of a single-user service. Carriers are rapidly adopting LTE forward the request for data has mobile networks around the world, the capacity utilization averaged 65 percent, according to a recent survey by Credit Suisse. The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) reported this month that there were 24 commercial LTE networks operational in 16 countries, and there are 71 networks by the end of this year.