Vodafone goes for Nortel

By RICHARD PAMATATAU

Mobile phone company Vodafone has forked out several million dollars for new systems from Canadian equipment giant Nortel Networks designed to support services to combat growing competition from Telecom.

Nortel has sold Vodafone New Zealand and Australia an "intelligent packet core" or IPC network system which will sit on top of its existing network as well as the new 3G network being built.

The deal was hotly contested by Ericsson and Siemens after they failed to win the 3G upgrade deal recently awarded to Nokia.

The Nortel system will allow Vodafone to offer customers a range of flexible billing options.

Customers may end up with bills based on the content they have accessed, time spent downloading or volume of data downloaded.

Customers may choose, for example, to receive images based on quality that is relevant to a particular application, or services may be bundled to suit requirements.

This type of service is coming into vogue around the world and offers carriers new opportunities to charge customers more, particularly with personalised mobile data services.

The same kit has been bought recently by T-Mobile, a division of Deutsche Telekom which will use it for its services in Britain, with the potential to expand across other T-Mobile European networks.

As well as enabling content-based billing, the system aims to deliver optimised IP (Internet Protocol)-based architecture that can simplify network design and may reduce operating costs.

This kind of saving has traditionally required a complicated mix of routers, load balancers, firewalls and switches.