What’s up with… NTT, NEC, Telenor, Cisco, Mavenir

• NTT invests in NEC to boost 5G R&D
• Telenor teams with Cisco on open vRAN
• Mavenir’s got its 5G core in DT’s lab

NTT’s move to build Japan’s 5G strength with NEC and Telenor’s open RAN engagement with Cisco are the shining stars in this news galaxy. 

• Giant operator NTT is spending 64.5 billion yen ($560 million) on a 4.8% stake in tech vendor NEC in an effort to create a Japanese 5G powerhouse. The two companies are also collaborating on an R&D joint venture focused on wireless and optical technologies that includes an effort to “promote open architectures such as O-RAN.”
• Telenor and Cisco have cemented their R&D relationship that is focused on 5G, cloud and IoT and, as part of their renewed vows, have “started an Open vRAN trial at Telenor headquarters in Norway to further investigate using a virtualized, open infrastructure to improve cost efficiency for service rollouts.” 
• Mavenir says it has successfully completed a lab test of its 5G core solution on Deutsche Telekom’s cloud network infrastructure. The vendor says it has also validated “seamless 5G-to-4G handover on a next generation web-scale core.”
• The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance has unveiled its new CEO: Cologne-based Anita Döhler, who is Senior Manager Digital, Industry X.0 at Accenture, will take over her new role from Dr. Peter Meissner, who will retire as CEO on 30 June.
• TIM (Telecom Italia) is the latest operator to strike an investment deal related to its towers portfolio: A consortium of investors led by private equity firm Ardian will invest in a new holding company that will own a 30.2% share in towers firm INWIT that is currently held by TIM. The Italian operator will hold a majority stake in the holding company, which will jointly control INWIT along with Vodafone. The Italian operator is also selling a 3% direct stake in INWIT to investment firm Canson Partners. In total, TIM says these deals will bring in €1.6 billion. Pick the holes out of that one!
• Nokia has unveiled what it calls its first network slicing management product. The cloud-native Digital Operations Center software solution is an “automated platform that manages 5G slice-based services securely and cost effectively throughout the entire lifecycle of services… [providing] a secure and fully automated process to design, deploy and operate network slices at scale across multi-vendor, multi-domain and multi-technology environments.” 
• Ericsson, meanwhile, is seeking to up its game in the private networks space by offering “dedicated network 5G standalone (SA) trial kits… The kits will be available to enterprises through communications service providers on selected low and mid-band spectrum. The Swedish vendor says it’s Working with Deutsche Telekom to provide such kits to enterprises in Germany, where the regulator set aside a chunk 5G spectrum specifically for private wireless network deployments.  

- The staff, TelecomTV