Having already registered some notable wins with European operators for LTE--Telenor being the latest--Huawei has continued to infuriate Ericsson and NSN by announcing further contract awards and trials.
Huawei said that Telecom Italia, which has already started a "pre-commercial LTE trial" in Turin, had selected the vendor as its technology partner for testing data speeds up to 140Mbit/s. The trial network involves 14 LTE base stations installed in the centre of Turin with each configured to handle three simultaneous high bandwidth voice and data connections.
The company also said that Belgacom has chosen Huawei to upgrade its mobile network, which operates under the Proximus brand. This deal is similar to the Chinese vendor's recent contract with Telenor, in that the cellco is looking to integrate its GSM, HSPA and LTE systems in the future to a converged RAN - supported by Huawei's SingleRAN platform and a unified packet core.
Proximus' incumbent RAN and core supplier is NSN, whose Flexi base station line competes head-on with SingleRAN in the mixed-radio environment. Although NSN may retain the core business at the LTE stage.
And in Greece, Vodafone has gone live with a Huawei-based HSPA+ upgrade to its network, offering a peak download rate of 28.8Mbit/s and upload rate of up to 5.8Mbit/s. HSPA+ MIMO mobile broadband services will initially be provided in selected areas of capital Athens, and then expanded to other cities.
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