Huawei Technologies said it is expected to complete the deployment of a city-wide LTE network for Hong Kong’s Genius Brand by 2012.
Tiger Lu, chief representative at Huawei’s Hong Kong representative office, said the LTE network will comprise over 2,000 base stations covering the whole city of Hong Kong and can support a download speed of up to 120Mbps.
Lu said the network would be ready for launch next year when Huawei completed the buildout. Lu didn’t reveal the exact timeline of the launch schedule, saying it depends on the operator’s commercial decision.
Genius Brand, a 50/50 joint venture between Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong Holdings and PCCW subsidiary Hong Kong Telecom (HKT), chose Huawei as its sole LTE equipment vendor in June.
Huawei started the LTE deployment early in the year, and has conducted several indoor and outdoor trials with Genius Brand for the last six months, Lu told a media briefing on Wednesday. The occasion was the signing of the contract for the deployment, during a forum on China's 12th five-year plan and economic, trade and financial co-operation and development between mainland China and Hong Kong.
He said Huawei has supplied its SingleRAN LTE solution which will support multiple operator core network (MOCN), allowing Hutchison and HKT to gain competitive edge in greatly reduced cost and time to market through sharing resources of the radio network and network spectrum while having two separate core networks.
The Chinese vendor has also signed agreements with Hutchison and HKT to upgrade their core networks to the evolved packet core (EPC) specification, and provide solutions for network resources and QoE management.