O2 Germany has said it will buy more than 8,000 base stations from Chinese vendor Huawei, as it adds GSM and UMTS capacity and coverage to its network. The network upgrade will be completed by the end of 2009.
O2 wants to take its GSM coverage up to almost 100%, and boost UMTS coverage to 60% by population. Huwaei will also supply HSPA products as part of the upgrade, although details on the HSPA rollout have not been made public.
Huawei’s managing director for Germany said that it was his company’s ability to provide an upgrade migration path from GSM to UMTS, HSPA and LTE within a unified base station that won the company the business.
"In addition to the expansion of the network to almost 100%, our goal is to provide the most state-of-the-art network infrastructure for mobile voice and data communications by 2009," says Andrea Folgueiras, CTO for O2 Germany. "Huawei is the ideal partner to meet our requirements. Most important for O2 is Huawei's ability to integrate UMTS and GSM technology into a base station, as well as an easy transformation of one existing GSM base station to UMTS."
