Alcatel-Lucent has been awarded a US$49 million contract by Bulgarian Telecommunications Company (BTC), the main telecommunication services operator in Bulgaria, to provide GSM/EDGE solutions to Vivatel, BTC’s GSM mobile subsidiary. Alcatel-Lucent will replace half of Vivatel’s current GSM Base Station Subsystem network equipment and will also provide project management, network design, integration, testing, installation, and multi-vendor radio network planning and optimization. The contract runs through 2011.
Under the terms of the contract, Alcatel-Lucent will design, deploy and maintain its industry-leading multi-standard radio access solution including its latest Base Station Controller platform (BSC Evolution) and fully flexible TWIN transceiver. The company's radio access solution is claimed to be "cost-efficient because it can accommodate multiple standards, such as GSM/GPRS/EDGE+ and 3G, using the same radio equipment. Furthermore, service providers can increase the capacity of their platform as demand warrants by introducing EDGE+, HSDPA and HSUPA on the same platform through a simple software upgrade."
* BTC is the main telecommunication services operator in Bulgaria. It has 2.5 million fixed-line subscribers and a growing number of mobile customers to its GSM operator, Vivatel which was launched in November 2005. Vivatel is the trade mark under which the mobile operator BTC Mobile is operating in the Bulgarian market.
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