Alcatel-Lucent to update Shanghai network

has announced that

, a subsidiary of China Telecom, has selected its services for a full-scale, citywide network transformation in

. The contract was signed through

, Alcatel-Lucent’s flagship Chinese company.

Upon completion of the project, scheduled for the end of June 2007, Shanghai Telecom’s nine million subscribers in Shanghai will have access to a full range of multimedia services. According to Alcatel-Lucent, this will include personalised answering tones, universal personal telecommunications, pre-paid telephony and IP bar, which is a combination of IP telephony for long distance and Internet browsing. Delivery of these services will be enabled by products from Alcatel-Lucent’s next-generation (NGN) portfolio.

Under the terms of this contract, Alcatel Shanghai Bell will provide media gateway controllers, media gateways, signalling gateways and the associated network management centre.

Alcatel-Lucent has acquired more than 200 NGN fixed and mobile customers to date, including operators such as BT, China Netcom, Asia Pacific Telecom Group (Taiwan), T-Mobile USA, Cingular, Nextel, Wind, Vimpelcom (Russia) and Telekom Austria.