Europe : ZTE Corporation, China’s largest listed telecommunications manufacturer and leading wireless solutions provider, is to install Vietnam’s first 3G network in Ho Chi Minh City. Under a contract announced today with Vietnam Power Telecom (VP Telecom), ZTE will provide a network based on the Corporation’s 450MHz EV-DO technology, which will bring 3G technology to the seven million inhabitants of Vietnam’s largest city.

The contract follows the successful installation by ZTE of Vietnam’s largest CDMA network, which covers 13 of the country’s provinces, including the most densely-populated and highly-developed areas of Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta.

“ZTE has done excellent work in the first phase and second phase of the largest CDMA network in Vietnam,” said Mr. Nguyen Manh Bang, General Manager of VP Telecom. “Thanks to ZTE’s good engineering performance and positive service mentality, we are confident in our future co-operation.”

The 3G network will utilise ZTE’s EV-DO, CDMA2000 1X and GoTa (Global Open Trunking Architecture) solutions to supply high-speed data, voice and trunking services. It will enable subscribers to use advanced features such as enhanced multimedia (voice, data and video) and access email, video-conferencing and web-browsing via high-speed, broad bandwidth connections.

“ZTE has profound technical strength and networking experience and is one of the few vendors able to offer a total wireless solution to operators,” said Mr. Mao Cheng Yu, ZTE’s representative in Vietnam. “We are very proud of our work in Vietnam and we will continue to work closely with VP Telecom to maintain our leading position in this rapidly-growing mobile market.”

The network in Vietnam is the latest deployment of ZTE’s 3G technology: earlier this year ZTE announced that it was to provide Laos with a 3G network, while in 2004 ZTE beat all other vendors to make the first ever 3G call in Tunisia. ZTE has already deployed 20 million lines of CDMA equipment for more than 50 operators in over 40 countries, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, Kenya, India, and Indonesia.