Lucent to expand China Unicom's CDMA network

October 19, 2004

Lucent Technologies announced a series of contracts totaling $107 million with China Unicom's provincial subsidiaries in Zhejiang, Shaanxi and Liaoning for their CDMA network expansion projects. Lucent will supply its CDMA2000 solutions to improve the capacity and coverage of Unicom's mobile networks in the three provinces. Lucent Worldwide Services, Lucent's services arm, will support these network deployments.

With this expansion, China Unicom will be able to offer new revenue-generating services such as video-on-demand, live streaming audio and high-speed mobile Internet access to its subscribers. Because Lucent's equipment can be cost-effectively upgraded to support more advanced 3G services, these deployments also will lay a solid foundation for the future evolution to 3G.

The fruitful collaboration between China Unicom and Lucent on the development of the operator's CDMA network began in May 2001 and has remained strong ever since.

"China is a strategic market for Lucent, and we are devoting considerable effort to ensuring that China Unicom is able to deploy the most cutting-edge technologies to support next-generation services on their network, one of the world's largest," said Cindy Christy, president of Lucent's Mobility Solutions Group.