Omantel awards LTE contracts to Ericsson and Huawei

Omantel has reportedly awarded two contracts to deploy an LTE network, with the Oman Daily Observer reporting that Ericsson and Huawei had won the contracts out of a short-list that had also included Nokia Siemens Networks, ZTE and Alcatel-Lucent.

Ericsson is said to have submitted a bid of OMR13.937 million (US$36.25 million) for its part of the contract and Huawei bid OMR 11.357 million.

Huawei was also recently selected as the preferred bidder for a network upgrade by rival mobile network, Nawras.

Omantel has previously said that its capex budget for 2012 would amount to OMR84 million, of which the LTE component is only a fraction.