Zain Awards $1 Billion Contract to Nokia Siemens Networks for Mobile Rollout in Saudi Arabia

Nokia Siemens Networks announced a contract valued at approximately US$1 billion to roll out a state-of--the-art greenfield mobile network in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on behalf of Zain. Formerly known as the MTC Group, Zain is the leading telecommunications mobile provider in 22 countries across the Middle East and Africa and was recently awarded the third mobile telecommunications license for Saudi Arabia.


Under the terms of the contract, Nokia Siemens Networks will provide to Zain in Saudi Arabia the latest 2G and 3G mobile network technologies, including HSDPA and HSUPA, based on the latest base station design and distributed architecture for both radio access and core networks according to the 3GPP release 4 standard. Nokia Siemens Networks said it will deliver a full turnkey solution, including managed services for five years from a dedicated local network operations center. The US$ 935 million turnkey contract also includes network planning, implementation, project management, systems integration, logistics management, multi-vendor maintenance, field services and network optimization for the base station sites. The company will also provide a wide range of operations and business support system (OSS/BSS) solutions that will help Zain reduce operating expenses and manage the network and service quality for its subscribers. Nokia Siemens Networks will also provide Zain with its convergent prepaid solution, charge@once select, for voice and data.


Nokia Siemens Networks is the sole supplier of Zain Saudi's core network, including the industry leading MSC Server mobile softswitch for cost-efficient voice and data services, as well as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which enables a wide range of rich communications services based on the Internet Protocol.http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.comhttp://www.zain.com