DENVER, United States—Venezuela’s leading operator, Telecommunicaciones Movilnet, signed a US$150 million contract that will allow Lucent Technologies to build a nationwide third-generation (3G) cdma2000 wireless network to complement its existing TDMA digital network.
Lucent did not announce the timeline for the launch of the network, but said Movilnet will deploy the initial phase of cdma2000 technology, known as cdma2000 1x, promising to double the network’s voice capacity and offer data-transmission speeds of up to 153 kilobits per second, a “nearly 10-fold increase from what is currently available.”
“It is an intriguing development, and the announcement speaks volumes of what we can expect in the near-term on the migration path that Latin American carriers are going to choose,” remarked Bryan Prohm, senior analyst with Gartner Dataquest. “We can expect more announcements along the lines of Movilnet.”
Prohm said that the performance of the Lucent-Movilnet contract might set the stage for which 3G technology a number of other major carriers in the region will select. He noted that although the Italian-controlled pan-regional networks of Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) seem to have committed to the GSM/Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) path, other players like Telef
