Alcatel-Lucent scores a double with China Mobile

Alcatel-Lucent may have found the diamond in the economic rough in China's telecom market, as the company has secured a Fiber to the Home and a wireless contract from China Mobile. This deal to provide FTTH equipment to China Mobile comes only a few weeks after Ericsson [1] won a string of FTTH contracts from China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom.

Under the terms of the contract, China Mobile will deploy Alcatel-Lucent's 7342 Intelligent Services Access Manager Fiber-to-the-User (ISAM FTTU) GPON system in 10 Chinese cities in the provinces of Anhui and Guangdong. China Mobile plans to leverage the equipment to offer high speed residential and business services. Separately, China Mobile in conjunction with Datang Mobile will deploy Alcatel-Lucent's Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) equipment to in 11 Chinese provinces.

China has become a fertile ground for FTTH and broadband. Fueled by aggressive rollouts by China's three largest telcos (China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile), broadband penetration will reach 14.5 percent in 2014, according to forecasts in a Pyramid Research report entitled "Communications markets in China." [2] This is a 7.6 increase from the end of 2008. DSL currently leads the charge in China's broadband market, currently making up 80 percent of the entire broadband subscriber base as of the end of 2008. At the same time, Pyramid says that the country will see its FTTH subscriber base increase to more than 50 million subscribers by 2014.

For more:
- see the official release [3]
- Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones has this article [4]

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Alcatel-Lucent reports first quarter 2009 results [5]
Ericsson wins FTTH deals in China [1]