*** For immediate use December 16, 2014

Tokyo & London, December 16, 2014 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) has been named a leader in the "Magic Quadrant for Small Cell Equipment 2014"*1 by analyst firm Gartner, which 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 minimise costs and enable the delivery of new value added services.

Consumers and enterprise customers often experience reduced mobile service indoors due to the poor penetration of higher frequency LTE and 3G signals generated by macro base stations. 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. This avoids the costly and time consuming installation of coaxial cable, specialist indoor radio planning and air conditioning units of competing Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS).

More significantly, 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 scalable, future-proofed 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 Ltd., commented, "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."

NEC also considers itself a market leader in the provision of residential and SME femtocells. NEC's gateway aggregates and connects indoor small cell networks across a large territory into the mobile core, helping to streamline configuration, monitoring and management activities for the operator.

In the outdoor environment, NEC is also helping operators identify and address ever changing coverage and capacity needs with reliable and speedy backhaul connectivity through its one-stop "New Last Mile" portfolio. NEC offers a wide choice of microwave and millimeter wave iPASOLINK small cell and backhaul solutions, a choice of fibre backhaul through best-of-breed partnerships. This is complemented by NEC's open HetNet platform to manage macro and small cell workloads with Self Organising Network (SON) capabilities and demand forecasting, hotspot identification and site acquisition and planning services. NEC works with a network of implementation partners to complement its own extensive service engineering footprint to deploy small cell networks at scale in a cost-competitive way on a global basis.

NEC's small cell solutions will be featured at Mobile World Congress in Hall 3 on stand #3N10 on 2-5 March 2015.

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*1 Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Small Cell Equipment", Ian Keene, 2 October 2014.

Disclaimer:
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. By providing a combination of products and solutions that cross utilize the company's experience and global resources, NEC's advanced technologies meet the complex and ever-changing needs of its customers. NEC brings more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation to empower people, businesses and society.  For more information, visit NEC at http://www.nec.com.

Based on its Mid-term Management Plan 2015, the NEC Group globally provides "Solutions for Society" that promote the safety, security, efficiency and equality of society. Under the company's corporate message of "Orchestrating a brighter world," NEC aims to help solve a wide range of challenging issues and to create new social value for the changing world of tomorrow. For more information, please visit http://www.nec.com/en/global/about/solutionsforsociety/message.html.



NEC is a registered trademark of NEC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Other product or service marks mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. (C)2014 NEC Corporation.



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