ESPOO, Finland -- Nokia’s Centralized RAN was recognized with the prestigious Leading Lights 2014 Award for Best New Product (Mobile) in Chicago on June 17, 2014. This innovative solution links multiple LTE base stations together into cooperative clusters that turn interference into useful traffic, resulting in greater uplink capacity to meet increasingly high mobile traffic demands during large events.

The Leading Lights Awards program focuses on next-generation communications technology, applications and services. The Best New Product (Mobile) Award is given to the company and product that demonstrates engineering and technical excellence and enables the deployment of profitable, next-generation mobile services. Judging was conducted by Light Reading's editors and the analyst team from Heavy Reading (http://www.heavyreading.com).

“Nokia’s recent Acquisition and Retention Study shows that excellent network and service quality is an important driver for customer loyalty,” said Tero Peltola, vice president of FDD LTE at Nokia. “Delivering outstanding network performance during large events is a challenge that cannot be solved simply by adding more hardware. This award is an important recognition of our software-based Centralized RAN which helps mobile operators more than double the average uplink capacity in their existing LTE networks without making additional hardware investments.”

Nokia Centralized RAN helps operators cope with network congestion by combining multiple LTE base stations that co-operate directly with one another to turn harmful interference into useful traffic. It can more than double the average uplink capacity across a cell, while ten times faster uploads can be achieved at the cell edge. In addition, mobile users will appreciate the extended battery life as smart devices no longer need to transmit at high power to cut through the interference. Built on the industry-leading* high-capacity Nokia Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station, Centralized RAN is compatible with all LTE devices available today.

“The standard of the entries in all 16 Leading Lights categories this year was exceptionally high, so the winners have really had to prove themselves worthy with great submissions that have been able to stand up to thorough scrutiny. A Leading Lights award is a true mark of excellence,” said Light Reading Editor-in-Chief Ray Le Maistre.

The Nokia Centralized RAN technology has been successfully demonstrated with the leading mobile operator LG U+ during a baseball game at Sajik Stadium in Busan, South Korea. Watch the related video on our uniteChannel.

Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK)