The COVID-19 outbreak has placed sudden and tremendous strain on healthcare facilities, especially in Intensive Care Units (ICUs).
For example, the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, which is one of the major healthcare facilities in the Netherlands, recently had to rapidly increase the amount of intensive care rooms available to handle increasing patient volumes with a lead time of only one week.

Vodafone Ziggo, a Dutch mobile operator, approached NEC as trusted indoor solution provider for its support. Within one-week NEC facilitated a site survey, network design, commissioning, and construction of a mobile network for the new ICU facility. The indoor mobile solution was provided as a full managed service by NEC, resulting in zero effort from the medical center to design, deploy, and operate the network. This reduced time-to-market from weeks to days, which was very critical given the urgency of the situation.

NEC was able to design the network architecture, deploy, and integrate the mobile network, especially in Radio Access Network (RAN) domain, leveraging its IT and telecom network expertise and experience as long-standing and trusted partner for mobile network operators.

NEC believes that this recent achievement of building a mobile network within a week in order to assist the people in the ICU with their important work against the COVID-19 crisis demonstrates our strong expertise and capabilities in the efficient deployment of mobile networks.