3GWeek - Asia’s Mobile News

PT Bakrie Telecom, one of Indonesia’s leading providers of fixed wireless voice and data services, is significantly boosting the capacity and transmission capabilities of its wireless network with new radio access, switching and optical solutions from Nortel.

The increased capacity of the CDMA2000 1X network, serving Greater Jakarta and 15 cities in West Java and Banten province, will position Bakrie to meet escalating subscriber demand for the voice and fixed wireless broadband Internet, data and fax services it provides via its ‘Esia’ brand.

“We are currently experiencing 55% growth within one quarter in 2006 and expect to grow this base to approximately 1.35 million subscribers during 2006, more than double last year’s total,” said AG Rao, Chief Technical Officer, PT Bakrie Telecom. “Esia is known as a market ‘mover and shaker’ in Indonesia, and we look to Nortel to support our continuing growth with highly secure and reliable world-class technology that keeps pace with the changing needs of the Indonesian market.”

“Nortel is strongly committed to supporting Bakrie Telecom’s evolution and delivering the solutions that enable it to bring substantial added value and communications innovation to its residential and business customers,” said James Demers, vice president, ASEAN, Nortel. “We have a highly successful and long-standing relationship with Bakrie, having built its original CDMA network in 2002 and implemented a major upgrade in 2005.”

The Nortel solution for Bakrie Telecom consists of new CDMA Metro Cell Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) to enable cost-effective network growth and seamless, investment-protecting evolution, via a card upgrade, to Nortel’s third generation (3G) 1xEV-DO CDMA infrastructure. At the network core, Bakrie is deploying Nortel’s flexible DMS-MTX Circuit Switching Platform to enable subscribers to receive dependable, continuous service.

To provide high-speed connectivity between the Nortel DMS-MTX and the base stations, as well as enable transparent and efficient handoff of calls to other carrier networks, Nortel is providing solutions from its optical portfolio, including the high-capacity Optical Metro 4150 multiservice next generation SDH platform, the Optical Metro 3500 DWDM-capable next generation SONET platform, and the Optical TN-1X add/drop multiplexer to ensure high-reliability, high-flexibility transport of services.

Nortel has designed, installed and launched more than 300 wireless networks in over 70 countries. Nortel was the industry’s first supplier with wireless networks operating in all advanced radio technologies, and is the only end-to-end provider of all next generation wireless solutions, as well as edge and core network solutions for IP, ATM and optical transport. [3G!]