Key areas will include RAN, mobile roaming, user plane and telco/edge cloud
NEC and Fortinet have announced a new partnership aimed at helping Communication Service Providers (CSPs) with 5G security. Fortinet is supplying its security solutions like FortiGate, while NEC is providing professional network integration services for telcos. The goal, the businesses said, is to deliver end-to-end high-performance security for 5G networks.
“The companies will focus on key network security use cases and services, such as Radio Access Network (RAN), mobile roaming, Gi-LAN/N6 and telco/edge cloud security,” the businesses said in a joint statement. “NEC, as the network integrator, will leverage Fortinet solutions to deliver customer-oriented and carrier-grade services, leveraging its global reach across more than 150 countries.”
The FortiGate 4800F is Fortinet’s latest compact Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW). The new 4U system was introduced in early August. It provides 2.4 terabits per second (Tbps) throughput and includes 400 gigabit per second Ethernet (GbE), 200 GbE and 40 GbE ports to scale based on network requirements.
NEC offers Fortinet solutions within the constellation of its Open 5G xHaul Ecosystem – a series of strategic alliances with vendors including Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Cisco, and others. NEC operates “Centers of Excellence” around the world to concentrate transport networking expertise. NEC touts the 5G xHaul ecosystem’s flexibility to be tailored to individual CSP needs.
NEC has historically focused its telecom efforts on the domestic Japanese market, according to Patrick Lopez, NEC’s global VP of product management. Lopez told RCR Wireless News that the company’s Open RAN focus with Japanese telcos like NTT DOCOMO and Rakuten Mobile has helped to create more global visibility for NEC’s efforts with CSPs.
“NEC was invited to a number of evaluations from vendors that are interested in Open RAN and we’ve been able to use our experience of deploying the world’s first massive MIMO Open RAN network in a dense urban environment. And that has proven quite successful with other operators as well outside of Japan, particularly Western Europe, but also in other parts of Asia Pacific and in North America,” said Lopez.
Lopez pointed towards NEC’s efforts with Telefónica to integrate Open RAN in Spain, Germany, the U.K. and Brazil as an example of the company’s efforts to deliver Open RAN systems with multivendor support, guaranteeing end-to-end performance and capability on par or better than integrated, proprietary and closed systems.
“NEC Open Networks is basically a market promise, which is that we will deliver radically open systems, multi vendor, but no strings attached and no compromise in the sense that a system, an Open RAN system, can be open and multi vendor, but there’s no sacrifice to performance, to stability, to availability,” Lopez said.
Hideyuki Ogata, NEC’s GM for service provider solutions, pointed to his company’s past success with Fortinet to modernize European telco infrastructure services provider CETIN in 2021 to provide end-to-end telco cloud and management security solutions.
“The global partnership with Fortinet is a perfect fit for NEC Open Networks’ ecosystem to enable our services to meet the customer’s urgent and diverse needs for network security in the 5G era,” said Ogata.
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