Pakistan's second largest telecom service provider - Ufone – has announced the biggest ever expansion of its network amounting to $550 million. The implementation would begin from November while its network is envisaged to cover over 1,500 cities, towns, villages and all major highways in Pakistan, Ufone President Babar Khan told the reporters. The plan focuses on the expansion of the network in terms of capacity and coverage in existing and new cities besides providing high-speed wireless data services based on EDGE technology. Khan said the current investment in network expansion would double its existing capacity. The investment signals the priorities of UAE's Etisalat's that recently purchased the state run entity, for the future which has so far been carefully weighing its options and expansion plans. The Ufone has awarded the contract to a Chinese company Huawei, one of the most rapidly growing telecom vendors globally. The new infrastructure would work along side the already deployed infrastructure by Nortel and Siemens. Khan said the previous Network Roll-out was also the single largest expansion plan in the history of Pakistan and this time again we are keeping the precedence. Huawei is the vendor of choice in latest Third Generation Telecommunications Networks, 28 of the world's top 50 operators worldwide are using Huawei infrastructure. The Ufone chief said that over the last 2 years, its subscribers' base had grown from 650,000 to over 8.5 million nationwide.
