Finnish equipment manufacturer Nokia has won a USD30 million contract to supply Singaporean mobile operator MobileOne Asia (M1) with a High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network. Under the agreement, Nokia will upgrade M1’s core network, provide a software upgrade, and deliver other related services such as network optimisation. Nokia’s HSPA solution is made up of two key technologies, High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), offering data speeds of up to 14.4Mbps (downlink) and up to 3.6Mbps (uplink).
According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms database, M1 was set up in August 1994 and the following May won licences to offer GSM cellular and paging services. Both were launched commercially on 1 April 1997 when SingTel’s period of exclusivity expired, and within three weeks the operator had signed up 35,000 users. It broke the million barrier in mid-2002, but since then growth has slowed; in the twelve months to March 2006 it added just 84,000 customers to take its base to 1.275 million.