Visionstream has won a $240 million contract with Optus to build and upgrade mobile sites for the number-two telco’s LTE network in Australia.
Under the contract, the Leighton Holdings subsidiary will be the preferred supplier for the civil and services upgrade to more than 1200 existing Optus mobile sites and for new sites across the country. The work includes radio design, site acquisition, site design, construction, installation, commissioning and optimisation of the Optus network.
Visionstream said work would begin “in the coming days”.
“We will be helping Optus to rapidly scale their mobile network, which allows their customers to increase use of 4G data services as they do more searching, browsing and streaming on the go,” Visionstream general manager, Allan Bradford, said in a statement.
4G in Australia: The state of the nation
Visionstream and Leighton previously constructed the national Optus network and performed upgrades to the 3G network. Visionstream also maintains Optus’s reef network in northern Queensland.
Optus and other Australian telcos are investing billions in their 4G networks.
Earlier this month, Optus announced that it had switched on an additional 4G network based on time-division (TD) LTE technology, providing better capacity for compatible 4G devices.
Optus also spent $649 million at April’s Digital Dividend auction for 2x10MHz of the 700MHz spectrum and 2x20MHz of the 2.5GHZ spectrum available. Earlier, it paid $230 million to acquire Vividwireless and its spectrum in the 2.3GHz band.
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