ANTEL taps ZTE for GPON in Uruguay

ZTE Corp. says that Uruguay’s Administración Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (ANTEL) will use its GPON equipment in a nationwide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment that will provide services to approximately 300,000 subscribers. ANTEL is Uruguay’s largest fixed-line operator as well as its biggest mobile carrier, with a 95.5 per cent share of the nation’s broadband market as of June 2010. ANTEL hopes to provide Internet data rates as high as 100 Mbps via the new GPON FTTH network.

ANTEL will use the GPON network to provide broadband services in a variety of forms, including FTTH, FTTB, backhaul, and enterprise. ZTE says it will provide its ZXA10 C300, which can be upgraded to NG PON and WDM-PON technologies.

"ZTE has successfully cooperated with ANTEL in a number of areas, including home gateways and cellphones,” said ZTE Vice President Xu Ming. “With our understanding of the Uruguayan telecoms market and our experience deploying more than 100 million lines of xPON across the globe, our goal is to build this project into a model deployment for South America that is scalable worldwide."