The board of directors of state-owned Office des Postes et Telecommunications de Nouvelle-Caledonie (OPT-NC), under the chairmanship of Thierry Cornaille, met on 23 June and approved several decisions, including the awarding of the contract for the extension of Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM) transport network equipment to Alcatel-Lucent, and a contract relating to the evolution and expansion of its 2G, 3G and 4G mobile network functionality to Intelia.
OPT-NC’s press release says that the new WDM ultra-high speed transmission network, which will cover the capital Noumea and the towns of Le Mont-Dore, Dumbea and Paita (i.e. Grand Noumea), will meet the growing transportation needs in the country, and aggregate all telecoms services (e.g. voice, internet, mobile, data) from access providers over a ‘single interface’, as well as offering OPT-NC’s enterprise users point-to-point or multipoint fibre connections at speeds of up to 10Gbps. The tender was launched in February this year, with Alca-Lu being selected following a tenders committee meeting on 26 May. The value of the three-year deal ranges from a minimum XPF200 million (USD1.88 million) to a maximum XPF600 million, and will see the vendor expanding the WDM network across the territory of New Caledonia to provide a reliable, scalable transport solution forming the backbone of the future optical network transport needs. It will also allow OPT-NC to migrate its existing SDH and GbE facilities to the WDM network.
Separately, OPT-NC approved the award of a contract to Intelia for the ‘extension of functionality’ of its 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile networks. The telco says that as at April 2015 it had more than 330 base stations, of which more than 80 were equipped with 4G technology. Mobile services accounted for the lion’s share, or 60% (XPF12 billion), of OPT-NC’s total revenue in 2014, with mobile internet access witnessing 33% year-on-year growth. At end-December the total number of Mobilis subscribers reached 260,000, of which 25,000 were mobile internet subscribers. Intelia has been awarded a three-year ‘over-the-counter’ deal to ensure OPT-NC can overcome some quality of service (QoS) issues on the network, due to capacity constraints, and provide a reliable service going forward. Included in the XPF280 million contract is a capacity increase on the telco’s mobile transport network to 10Gbps.