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Zain Kuwait and Huawei have announced plans to launch a first-of-its-kind Joint Innovation Center which will serve as a research hub for the advancement of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) mobile broadband technologies and associated LTE applications for Zain's mobile customers in Kuwait and across the region.
The new joint innovation center will ultimately support Zain in enhancing its service offerings while realizing additional revenue streams through the advancement of its LTE network capabilities.
Both Zain and Huawei will be investing capital in the construction of the Center with the two companies also bringing together an elite team of global experts, engineers and other human resources to lead the Center's work.
The two companies signed a MoU outlining their ambitions for the Joint Innovation Center during a ceremony at this week's Mobile World Congress 2013 being held in Barcelona, Spain. In attendance at the signing ceremony was Omar Al Omar, CEO and Hani EL-Kukhun, COO of Zain Kuwait, Shafeeq Omar, CCO of Zain Kuwait as well as Shi Yaohong, president of Huawei Middle East, Pan En, GM of Huawei Kuwait, and Mohamad Sharara, head of Zain Key Account at Huawei.
Omar Al Omar, CEO of Zain Kuwait, said "The center aims at enhancing the overall LTE experience throughout Zain's Middle East networks, allowing customers to browse the internet through their smartphones faster than before. Zain looks very positively on collaborations with successful outcome like Huawei and plans to pursue further partnerships to ensure that its customers receive the best services."
Amongst the goals for the new Joint Innovation Center will be the testing of new LTE-compatible services and applications, as well as the development of sophisticated processes that can be used to measure subscribers' quality of service and perform more robust customer-experience analysis.
To date Huawei has launched more than 28 joint innovation centers worldwide in addition to 16 global research and development (R&D) centers.
"As a provider of the fastest mobile broadband services to customers across Kuwait, Zain has succeeded in evolving various generations of world-class technologies in order to provide its customers today with an expansive coverage network and high-speed LTE access," said Yaohong during the MoU signing ceremony.