Motorola Inc.’s Asia Pacific Cellular Infrastructure Group has signed a contract valued at more than $100 million to deploy a fixed wireless telephone network in the Philippines.
Motorola said the network will supply service in the southern and western Mindanao regions, located in the southern Philippines, as part of a build-and-transfer arrangement between the Pilipino Telephone Corp. (Piltel) and Marubeni Corp. of Japan.
The network will be part of Piltel’s commitment to provide 400,000 additional telephone lines to residential and business subscribers, said Motorola. Piltel has been a landline telephone provider since 1968 and operates a nationwide cellular phone and paging system along with other wireless services throughout the Philippines.
The network uses Motorola’s mobile telephone switching office/mobile switching center architecture, which provides fixed subscriber capability to an already existing cellular mobile network, said Marty Singer, Motorola’s vice president and general manager of the wireless access and business development division. The switching center performs the billing and database functions and provides a trunked interface to the public switched telephone network.
Marubeni, one of Japan’s largest general trading houses, will deploy Motorola’s ThinCell base station product and large-capacity EMX 2500 switches. The network will use Narrowband Advanced Mobile Phone Service technology, which provides significant cost benefits to customers, Singer added.
“A major part of cost is the subscriber unit, and the great advantage of putting in an analog WiLL system is that all units are a lot less expensive than their digital counterparts,” said Singer. “When trying to get service to a group of people who have been waiting, analog is still a real good deal.”
Motorola said the network is expected to be deployed late this year with commercial service scheduled to begin in the second quarter of next year. Plans call for WiLL service eventually to cover all of the Philippines.
Motorola said the contract is one of its largest ever for WiLL equipment. The company’s three other largest deployments were in Hungary in 1995, Ghana in 1994 and Spain in 1992. Motorola also noted it was awarded a $270 million contract from Piltel in 1995 to expand its cellular phone system in metropolitan Manila.
