Years ago, people looked to areas like China and India as so-called greenfield opportunities. These were places unencumbered by legacy telephony systems, with growing demand and a chance to deploy next-generation communications technologies to address the needs of the region, rather than rely on aging copper wires, crumbling infrastructure etc....
Today we learned that China Telecom, China's leading telecom operator, has selected Alcatel-Lucent to provide an end-to-end solution for the carrier to increase its capacity and coverage of its mobile voice and data network throughout the country.
Valued at $230 million (US) the contract calls for CDMA wireless networking solutions to be deployed in 56 cities of 9 provinces in China. The deployment is currently underway and the expanded network will begin providing commercial services by the end of 2008.
The deployment will comprise a range of base stations designed to fit a variety of scenarios, from usage-heavy urban areas to rural areas where population is scarce.
