Alcatel-Lucent today announced that Zain Saudi Arabia (Zain KSA) has selected Alcatel-Lucent’s IP/MPLS-based mobile backhaul solution to respond to the sharp increase in bandwidth requirements, and to keep pace with subscribers’ demands.

Saudi Arabia is widely recognised as the largest telecommunications market in the Middle East region, with growth in this sector currently estimated at about 30 per cent per annum.

The Alcatel-Lucent solution offers a converged, scalable, multi-access and all-IP network allowing dynamic service creation and delivery at the lowest cost per bit while enabling broadband accessibility to all Zain KSA subscribers, delivering service innovation, streamlining network operations and generating new revenues for the operator. As part of the Alcatel-Lucent’s High Leverage Network architecture, the solution will offer to Zain an increased capacity at lower cost while providing the necessary service reliability and quality of experience that subscribers expect, while it will strengthen the ability of Zain KSA to offer its customers the best possible quality of experience and also prepare its network infrastructure to immediately launch next generation communication and data services.

Huawei today released its financial results for the first half of 2011. Sales revenue grew 11 per cent year-over-year to CNY98.3 billion (US$15.39 billion) and operating profit reached CNY12.4 billion.

Cathy Meng, Huawei’s CFO said that although the global economy continues to face uncertainty, Huawei remains confident in achieving its annual sales target of CNY199 billion with its Device and Enterprise businesses as new growth drivers.

While Huawei has traditionally focused on providing telecom solutions for the operator segment, it is transforming into an integrated ICT solutions vendor to capitalise on the significant growth presented by this market.

In early 2011, Huawei established its Enterprise Business Operation Centre, actively promoting the ICT transformation of the enterprise market. Huawei Enterprise has expanded its businesses into over 100 countries, providing ICT infrastructure construction and information services to multiple industries including government, finance, transportation, power, energy and the Internet. Huawei has launched an upgraded version of its Telepresence product, an HD video conferencing system. In the first half of the year, more than 500 Telepresence systems were shipped, driving the total shipment to over 1,000 units. Huawei also launched a new high-performance access router, delivering comprehensive IP network solutions to its enterprise customers.

Huawei also introduced new cloud computing business models by launching cloud solutions for the visual media (“Media Cloud”) and healthcare (“Health Cloud”) industries. Huawei’s cloud computing and data centre solutions have been deployed in over 20 countries in the world, widely used across different industries such as operators, medical, radio & broadcast, the Internet, education and e-government, among others.

Huawei Device realised strong growth during this period, with shipments up by 40 per cent year-over-year to 72 million units. In the mobile broadband market, Huawei continued to lead the industry, ranking among the top providers globally. The handset business grew by over 100 per cent with smartphones at the centre of the growth and the shipment of Android-based smartphones ranking among the top five in the world.

Batelco announced a number of new international operators as part of its Unified Local Data Roaming Rates scheme. Under the telco’s Local Unified Rates, customers pay 600 fils (US$1.56) per megabyte when they roam with the designated international operators.

Batelco introduced Unified Roaming Rates in 2009 for data roaming in a number of regional countries. The original line-up included Saudi Arabia (Al Jawal and Mobily), UAE (Etisalat & Du), Qatar (Qtel), Kuwait (Wataniya and Viva), Oman (Nawras), Egypt (Mobinil), Jordan (Umniah) and Yemen (Sabafon).

Now in this new delivery, Batelco has extended its line up of operators to include providers outside of the GCC and Arab region.

The new countries and operators are: the UK (O2), Spain (Moviles Espana), Czech Republic (O2), and Ireland (O2).

India’s Reliance Communications is reported to be trying to sell off its telecom towers business, and has hired UBS to sell its 95 per cent stake in Reliance Infratel.

The bank has already contacted several private equity groups, two US tower networks, and the UAE’s Etisalat about the deal, the India Times reported.

The tower network owner is worth around US$5 billion, and the funds are needed to help reduce Reliance Communications’ significant debt pile, which stood at around US$7.5 billion in May 2011. The interest on the debt is weighing heavily on the telco’s financial performance.

However, potential bidders have said Reliance’s valuation of the stake is at least US$1 billion too high.

Earlier this year, rival Indian tower network operator, Viom Networks (formerly Tata-Quippo) pulled out of talks to buy Reliance Infratel after the two companies could not agree on a price. Again, Reliance was seeking US$5 billion for the company, which Viom described as “unrealistic”.

The WiMAX Forum says WiMAX technology has broken the 20 million global subscriber mark. According to Infonetics Research, WiMAX technology reached a total of 20 million subscribers at the end of Q211. This number is forecast to rise to 25 million by year-end.

Notable growth has been tracked in the US, the Indian sub-continent, and Latin America. With the levels of operator activity and device ecosystem growing, Infonetics Research forecasts WiMAX subscribers to surpass 100 million by the end of 2015.

In the first half of 2011 UQ Communications of Japan doubled its subscriber base, breaking the one million subscriber mark in June. Also in Asia Pacific, new Malaysian WiMAX operator YTL, which launched WiMAX services in November of 2010, had netted over 300,000 subscribers by June.

In the US, Clearwire and its wholesale partners continue to grow their subscriber base. Clearwire announced that it ended the second quarter of 2011 with 7.65 million total subscribers, up 365 per cent from Q210. Clearwire also increased its guidance to an expected 10 million subscribers by the end of 2011.