In a move to beef up its mobile broadband portfolio, Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN) has expanded its partnership with Juniper Networks to cover “secure IP connectivity for high-performance mobile broadband networks”.

After the sale of its devices unit to Microsoft, Nokia will be heavily reliant on NSN, its mobile infrastructure and services operation.

Closer cooperation with Juniper should help, and might even fuel speculation of possible M&A between the two companies.

Up against the still-formidable Ericsson and the growing presence of Chinese players Huawei and ZTE on the international stage, the NSN board was believed recently to be eyeing an approach to Alcatel-Lucent, but the US-French vendor is now undergoing a radical restructuring programme.

As far as the closer Juniper connection is concerned, there are four areas of focus.

One of those is next generation mobile backhaul for mobile operators that need to upgrade and consolidate their backhaul networks to support LTE and LTE-Advanced architecture.

Another area is radio access security to encrypt and firewall traffic coming into the mobile network via LTE, as well as the 2G/3G radio access network.

Mobile site connectivity for operators upgrading or extending their mobile infrastructure with the latest NSN products (at the controller sites and at the mobile core) is also a focus, as is carrier-grade NAT (network address translation) for operators running out public IPv4 addresses and planning for IPv6 migration.

Both firms say they already have products commercially available that cover all these four areas.