Vivo Selects Ericsson to Deliver SDP to Provide Multimedia Applications

Brazil's largest mobile operator Vivo has selected Swedish telecoms equipment supplier Ericsson to supply a service delivery platform (SDP) to provide consumer multimedia applications, Ericsson said in a statement.

"As Brazil's telecoms market becomes increasingly competitive and consolidation takes place, with coverage largely complete, the operators need to differentiate themselves with new services," Celio Rosa, Ericsson's multimedia manager for the Vivo contract, told BNamericas.

Under the agreement, Ericsson will design and deliver the SDP to enable Vivo to offer a mix of services such as MMS, SMS, Wap or location services which are easy to change or maintain, the executive said.

Vivo, a joint venture between Spain's Telefónica and Portugal Telecom, will also be able to have a layer of services working across different technologies such as GSM, CDMA and even 3G WCDMA, Rosa said.

As an example of the benefits of SDP, Rosa highlighted an unnamed European operator which boosted its service and content revenues by 50% a month, while its number of active services jumped to 200 from 130. Rosa would not comment on Vivo's targets.

VIVO GSM

Vivo announced it would deploy a GSM network on its current CDMA network and expects the overlay to be one of the biggest deployments of its kind in the world.

According to Rosa, Ericsson completed most of the network rollout for Vivo's GSM overlay project last year. "Ericsson put up 2,300 radio base stations in 103 days in 2006," Rosa said, claiming this was a world record.

Vivo began to test its prepaid GSM handsets in the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in December 2006. The operator is now rolling out its prepaid handsets across other major cities."

Posted to the site on 14th February 2007