Tokyo, December 9, 2025 – NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) announced today that its Network Operating System (NOS) has been awarded the Silver Badge for compliance with requirements outlined by the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). The NOS meets the Mandatory Use Case Requirements for SDN for Transport (MUST) developed for TIP’s open and disaggregated 400G optical transponder solution, Phoenix. This recognition further demonstrates the advancement and commercial-level reliability of NEC’s optical transport solutions.
MUST is being implemented by the TIP Open Optical and Packet Trasport (OOPT) MUST SubGroup, led by telecom operators such as Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telia, which defines the target architecture and technical requirements for SDN-based transport networks. It requires that the control and management APIs for open optical terminals (O-OTs) comply with OpenConfig data models.
The Phoenix solution is also part of TIP’s OOPT initiative, led by NTT, Telia, Telefonica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and MTN, which defines open technologies, architectures, and interfaces in the optical and IP networking domains. Phoenix is the result of close collaboration among operators, specifying technical requirements for evaluating solution compliance through TIP’s testing and validation process.
In the process of becoming compliant with Phoenix, NEC has transitioned from a traditional optical transmission architecture to an advanced SDN management approach, adopting the SDN concept of centralized network resource management to enable flexible control and operation. Practical feedback from leading telecommunications operators such as Telefónica and Orange was important in refining NEC’s NOS solution to meet the specified requirements of TIP. The solution already earned a Gold Badge from TIP’s Phoenix Program in January 2025, and its growing maturity has now been further demonstrated by receiving the MUST Silver Badge.