Telenor has handed Ericsson a five-year contract to provide equipment and managed services for the company's Myanmar rollout.
Under the deal, Ericsson will help Telenor roll out a multi-vendor 2G/3G mobile network. The vendor already had a contract to build the RAN for large parts of the network.
Ericsson said it will use its multi-standard network product offering for the rollout, which can combine GSM/EDGE, W-CDMA/HSPA, LTE and IP-based transport systems into a single RAN.
The rollout will use 2G and 3G equipment that can be upgradable in the future to meet capacity requirements. Ericsson said it plans to ramp up local hiring efforts in anticipation of the rollout.
“We are pleased to add Ericsson to the group of global partners we will be working with as we develop the Telenor Myanmar telecommunications network,” Telenor Myanmar CEO Petter Furberg said. “This is a historic project for Myanmar and for Telenor, and strong partners like Ericsson will be critical to its success.”
Telenor has committed to providing geographic coverage of 83% of Myanmar with voice services and 78% with data services within the next five years. This would represent a population coverage of around 90%.
Telenor and Ooredoo both won Myanmar telecom licenses in a hotly competitive tender process last year. The licenses were finally awarded in February, after lawmakers settled on a regulatory framework for the nation's telecom sector.