French-American telecoms equipment group Alcatel-Lucent said on Monday it had won a contract from Germany's VSE NET to build the country's "first commercial" Wimax network in the Saar region bordering France.
Work on the network - being implemented with Wimax license holder Inquam Broadband - would start this autumn and commercial operations should start in January 2008, Alcatel-Lucent said in a statement.
VSE NET GmbH is a subsidiary of Artelis, a joint venture between Luxembourg utility Cegedel and German utility VSE AG, which is majority owned by utility RWE. Inquam, which holds Wimax frequency licenses in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovakia and Croatia, is majority owned by NextWaveWireless. WiMAX networks are also being developed in Germany by Nortel and Motorola.