Saudi Telecomm (STC) has awarded Marconi an exclusive redesign and consultancy contract to help implement an ambitious project to expand its network and maximise on earnings.
The agreement, worth almost $30 million, will help enable STC to drive incremental revenue from around two million new subscribers, as well as reducing network hardware costs at a time when Saudi Arabia is experiencing growth in GSM subscriber demand of more than 30 percent per year.
MSI, a wholly owned subsidiary of Marconi, will provide radio frequency (RF), transmission and core network consultancy to help further expand STC's network.
STC's mobile subscriber base grew 32.6 per cent in 2000. STC forecasts that with the completion of its network redesign and expansion this year, it will be able to provide services to over 4.5 million subscribers, and its expanded network will have the capacity to provide service to 5.6 million customers.
"MSI was chosen as STC's preferred network consultant because of the success of its strong partnership developed on an earlier network expansion consultancy contract," MSI said. "Marconi has established world-class engineering processes and procedures with STC to enable its network expansion plans."
An STC statement said Marconi's consultancy was a crucial element to the successful expansion, management and performance of its network. "Our experience with Marconi (MSI) to date has been best-in-class and has enabled timely and effective network expansion. As well as succeeding on the initial expansion, Marconi has formed a close partnership with STC's GSM division."
Jack Kemp, vice president, MSI Saudi Arabia and STC account director, commented: "Growth in subscriber demand is the impetus for all operators to maximise the return on their network investments, whilst ensuring consistent new service introductions and enhancements for customers. Saudi Telecomm has a major opportunity to add customers and new services. Marconi's value is in its understanding of how to help STC achieve its business goals."
A Marconi spokesman listed the following services the company would provide in the processes category:
* Optimal nominal cell planning, site selection and final cell configurations guaranteeing that optimisation is kept to a minimum
* Rapid and seamless integration support, ensuring that sites are integrated into the network without effecting the existing network and /or customers
* Monitoring of the performance of the newly integrated sites in the network to optimise the utilisation of the site
* Procedures for co-ordinating regional and central optimisation functions
Marconi's services in RF Design will cover site candidate evaluation and selection (implementation support), existing site capacity analysis and forecasting, optimisation feedback evaluation and solution recommendations, in-building designs and cell enhancer analysis and recommendations.
Services in RF design will also cover non-performing high and low sites, RF design equipment recommendations, frequency planning and propagation model tuning.
In the area of optimisation, the company will cover single site verification, cluster testing, quality of service benchmark testing, software/hardware change analysis and performance engineering
Marconi (MSI) will also be responsible for customer care, transmission and planning of the core network.
Marconi plc has research and development facilities in 19 countries and manufacturing operations in 16.
