NEC has announced the beginning of shipment of Low power Radio Equipment (LRE) for NTT DOCOMO LTE base stations.

LRE are low power wireless devices that are deployed indoors in order to expand the radio signal coverage to locations that outdoor base stations cannot access, such as basements and the high floors of large buildings. NEC's LRE are compatible with DOCOMO's LTE and W-CDMA standards.

According to NEC, By newly introducing integrated digital signal processing module, the size of these LRE were reduced by approximately 35% and power consumption was reduced by more than 20% in comparison to existing products. In addition, these LRE's adoption of MIMO has enabled faster and higher quality communications.

DOCOMO began trial of its LTE commercial network on June 8, 2010. NEC provided this network with a variety of products that include LTE base stations, radio equipment, core network equipment and switches. NEC was also selected as a development and manufacturing vender for DOCOMO's LTE mobile terminals.