ZTE, a global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions said on Monday that I would assist ANTEL (Administración Nacional de Telecomunicaciones)  in providing 300,000 subscribers in the country with a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON). The tender is one of the largest ever issued in the South American market.

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. Under the contract, ZTE will help the operator deliver broadband speeds of 100Mbps.

The GPON will offer broadband under a range of FTTx scenarios, including FTTH, FTTB, backhaul and enterprise networks. For the project, ZTE will provide a next-generation, convergent full-service optical access platform, the ZXA10 C300. The platform meets ANTEL’s requirements and is upgradable 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.”