On September 19,2011,ZTE Corporation,a publicly-listed global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions,announced it has been selected by the Administración Nacional de Telecomunicaciones(ANTEL)to assist in providing 300,000 subscribers in the country with a gigabit passive optical network(GPON).The tender was one of the largest ever put out in South America.

ANTEL is Uruguay’s largest fixed-line operator and mobile carrier,with a 95.5 percent share of the nation’s broadband market as of June 2010.Under the contract,ZTE will help the operator deliver broadband speeds of 100 Mb/s.

The GPON will offer broadband under a range of FTTx scenarios,including FTTH,FTTB,backhaul and enterprise networks.ZTE will provide a next-generation,converged,full-service optical access platform called ZXA10 C300.The platform meets ANTEL’s requirements and is upgradable to NG PON and WDM PON.

“ZTE has 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 telecom 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.”

ZTE was one of the first vendors to develop and commercialize optical access network products.

According to Ovum’s“4Q10 Market Share—FTTx,DSL,and CMTS ports”,ZTE ranks first among major GPON vendors in revenue growth.To date,108 million lines of ZTE xPON products,over 55 million of which are broadband equipment,have been deployed worldwide.