China's telecom equipment supplier Huawei recently announced that it has been selected by Vodafone to construct its 2G/3G networks in the Czech Republic, the SinoCast Daily Business Beat reported on July 10. Under the five-year agreement signed by these two companies, Huawei will provide the advanced SingleRAN (Radio Access Network) system to help Vodafone Czech Republic increase its 3G network coverage in Prague and Brno while upgrading and expanding its existing 2G EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) network. To date, Vodafone's 2G network coverage has included 90% of the population in Czech. The agreement is the conclusion of the negotiation between these two companies, which intended to enter into a similar agreement on March 2006 but failed to do so.

In related news, aside from the Czech Republic, Huawei had entered into similar agreements with Vodafone in the past years, whereby Huawei would help the latter to deploy its 2G/3G networks in over ten cities, including Spain, Greece, Hungary, Romania and Qatar.