Huawei wins in Denmark

Huawei has landed a major deal in Denmark, ousting rival Ericsson to become the sole mobile network technology and service provider for Danish carrier TDC.
 
The Chinese telecom vendor said Thursday it has won a $700 million (€506 million) contract to upgrade TDC’s mobile network to LTE across the country.
 
The deal is Huawei’s latest win in Europe and a blow for Ericsson, which has been managing TDC’s mobile network since 2008.
 
Under the deal, TDC will replace existing equipment provide by Ericsson with Huawei’s gear. TDC will also hand over the management and operation of its upgraded GSM/UMTS/LTE network to Huawei over a six-year period.
 
“This partnership for TDC is the most critical relationship we have made with a vendor and this has been, and will be, the biggest decision I’ve made as a CEO,” TDC chief executive Carsten Dilling told reporters at a media briefing in Shenzhen yesterday.
 
Dilling said the company has been worked closely with Danish authorities and intelligence agencies to conduct investigations before deciding on Huawei.
 
“We have invited them in and they have the transparency on everything we do,” Dilling said. “On the TDC side, we feel that we learned a lot by having the intelligence agencies in and we will keep them in as we are running this partnership.”
 
This, Dilling said, would enable TDC to build a mobile network platform from a security way, which could be a showcase for the rest of Europe and worldwide,”
 
“For Huawei, that can be an extreme interesting case.”
 
 
Dilling said the company has chosen Huawei over Ericsson because of the Chinese vendor has committed to ensuring that “TDC will always have a network that outperform competitors’, with the best user experience and the best network performance.”
 
He said Huawei’s technology expertise and technology quality, which "match the leader of the world”, also gained the vendor the contract.
 
Ryan Ding, CEO of Huawei’s carrier networks group, said the company is excited about the deal because of its focus on customer experience rather than traditional network metrics.
 
Vendors and operators had focused on the quality of infrastructure - traditional KPIs, QoS and network performance, but this partnership will look more into end user experience, Ding said.
 
Huawei will allocate 250 staff for TDC and this deal will create 100 new jobs in Denmark, with recruitment expected to complete March 2014, he noted.