Huawei scores hat trick of European mobile deals

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Huawei scores hat trick of European mobile deals

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 25 November, 2009

READ MORE: Europe | Huawei Technologies | HSDPA | LTE

Huawei is riding high in the advanced mobile networks market, increasingly shedding its old image for being 'cheap and cheerful' and notching up a series of deals in HSPA+ and LTE. Its key growth area is western Europe, where most carriers have advanced 3G+ and 4G roadmaps in place, and this week it has announced three new deals, in Belgium, Italy and Greece.

In Belgium, incumbent Belgacom has chosen the Chinese vendor to upgrade its mobile network, which operates under the Proximus brand. This deal is similar to Huawei's recent contract with Telenor, in that, over time, the cellco is looking to integrate its GSM, HSPA and LTE systems in a converged RAN (supported by Huawei's SingleRAN platform) and a unified packet core. Proximus' incumbent RAN and core supplier is Nokia Siemens, whose Flexi base station line competes head-on with SingleRAN in the mixed-radio environment. Although NSN may hang onto core business at the LTE stage, the Belgacom decision highlights how successful Huawei is being at displacing locally based suppliers in western Europe.

The telco has signed a multiyear frame agreement with its new vendor to upgrade its nationwide infrastructure to offer GSM, HSPA and LTE over a single network using multiple frequencies. Mixing and matching technologies and frequencies in this way can achieve the optimal cost/performance balance across urban and rural areas, as well as accelerating roll-out of new services.

Scott Alcott, EVP for Belgacom's service delivery engine and wholesale operations, commented: "By partnering with Huawei for the progressive swap of the current Proximus radio network, Belgacom continues to pursue its fixed/mobile convergence strategy in a controlled way."

In Italy, Telecom Italia has begun its pre-commercial LTE trial in the city of Turin, working with Huawei and also with an eye to a unified network in future. It has installed 14 base stations around the industrial center, integrating them into existing mobile infrastructure. It says the base stations can support peaks of 140Mbps per cell and handle three high bandwidth connections at once.

And in Greece, Vodafone has gone live with an HSPA+ upgrade to its network, offering a peak download rate of 28.8Mbps and upload rate of up to 5.8Mbps. HSPA+ MIMO mobile broadband services will initially be provided in selected areas of capital Athens, and then expanded to other cities. Vodafone is using kit from Huawei.