MONTREAL, Canada-Montreal-based Telesystem International Wireless, through its London-based wholly owned subsidiary Dolpin Telecom, and Motorola have established a strategic relationship for deploying TETRA in Europe.
The alliance includes infrastructure and handset business agreements valued at more than US$400 million, in part, for deploying a network in Germany and the purchase of up to 400,000 second-generation TETRA handsets from Motorola, said the two companies.
The relationship represents Motorola’s largest agreement to date for the deployment of TETRA-based equipment in Europe, according to TIW and Motorola. Work on the German nationwide network is set to begin immediately, with initial services targeted to be available in 2000.
This represents a significant step in TIW’s strategy for a company that has wandered far from its home base and original paging strategy as it pursues emerging opportunities in Europe as well as in Latin America and Asia.
As of 31 December, the carrier owned a stake in wireless licenses covering more than 515 million people, with more than 1.5 million subscribers. This includes 1.17 million cellular customers in Brazil, Romania, China and India; 202,000 trunked radio customers in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium; and 183,000 paging customers in Mexico and the Netherlands.
Dolphin is in charge of TIW’s digital trunked radio operations in Europe and is the largest analog trunked radio provider on the continent. Its network is poised to become the first commercially available TETRA system in the world.
This summer, Dolphin expects to begin offering TETRA services in the United Kingdom and plans a TETRA rollout in France by the end of this year.
