Telecom New Zealand has announced a $200 million deal with Lucent Technologies for the supply and management of its 027 mobile network.
The five year agreement signed today is one of the most extensive managed service agreements in the world among mobile network operators, says Telecom.
Lucent, through its Worldwide Services division (LWS), is responsible for the network planning, design, deployment, support, and overall management of Telecom's 027 CDMA network in addition to supplying the equipment to expand the network. Lucent was responsible for building and deploying the 027 network for Telecom 18 months ago. The network provides customers with high data speeds as well as enabling services such as Xtra on mobile phones.
About 50 Telecom staff will transfer to Lucent on July 1.
Lucent New Zealand general manager Ian Gardner says in a statement that there are significant opportunities for transferring staff given the global operation of the company.