NEC, until recently a nonentity in the RAN market outside its native Japan, is suddenly looking credible as a counterweight, along with Samsung, to the dominance of the largest suppliers – especially welcome to operators which are constrained from doing business with Huawei or ZTE. The Japanese company has leapt up the RAN rankings largely because of its prominent role in the high profile Rakuten Mobile deployment, for which is supplying a 5G radio and Massive MIMO antenna array that can work with multiple vendors’ virtual network functions (VNFs). This complex piece of kit was codeveloped with the operator and helped assert NEC’s credentials both for 5G engineering and for openness. Now, it is gaining new resources to develop its…