Huawei bags China Mobile VoLTE project

NEW DELHI: Chinese telecom giant Huawei has been awarded the largest share of China Mobile’s VoLTE project, which includes network convergence building and reconstruction across 31 provinces and municipalities in that country.

According to the preliminary result of the overall bidding process, Huawei will again be a key strategic partner of China Mobile as it implements 'Three New' strategies proposed at the beginning of 2014, which includes New Call, New Message, and New Contact.

In total, Huawei will capture almost half of the China Mobile VoLTE project share (CM-IMS phase-2).

China Mobile aims to provide services for 50 million commercial VoLTE subscribers by the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016, and a key part of this is the evolution of fixed IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks to Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) networks across 14 of China’s provinces.

Among these 14 provinces, Huawei has won the bid to conduct FMC transformation for 12 developed coastal provinces and cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu.

To select its partner vendor for CM-IMS phase 2, China Mobile conducted a series of activities including stipulating technical specifications, conducting internal and field tests, performing field test verification in multiple cities, and organizing bidding.

Huawei has worked to meet China Mobile’s requirements during every step of this process, and the Huawei VoLTE solution, which features easy deployment and fast commercialization, has been fully recognized by China Mobile and its branches. The close cooperation of the two parties in technical innovation and network deployment aims to greatly accelerate commercial development of VoLTE across the entire industry.

VoLTE deployment and commercialization is forecast to grow rapidly in 2015, with a total of 28 commercial VoLTE networks currently existing worldwide according to a report by GSMA.