Nokia Siemens wins GSM-R contract in China

Nokia SiemensNetworks has secured the GSM-Rcontractfor China's Hefei-Nanjing passenger-dedicated line, a newly built high-speed passenger service networkin the country.

The 166km-long Hefei-Nanjing Line, connecting the capitals of Anhui and Jiangsu provinces in the Yangtze River Delta, is an integral part of the "Four Longitudinal and Four Horizontal" Passenger Service Network. The line, to be put into operation in early 2008, will become China's first passenger-dedicated line for commercial use at speeds of 200kph.

"We are honored to provide GSM-R system for China's first railway passenger-dedicated line at 200km/h. It marks another milestone of Nokia Siemens Networks in GSM-R following our contract in this April for the Wuhan-Guangzhou Line¡ªthe longest high-speed railway in the world", said Mr. Zhang Zhiqiang, head of the greater China region of Nokia Siemens. "We hope to make Hefei-Nanjing Line a model of GSM-R communication system for passenger-dedicated railway lines in China."

Nokia Siemens is one of the inventors of GSM-R technology, with Siemens researching and creating the GSM-R standard starting in the early 1990s.The world's first three GSM-R trial networks and the first commercial network were all supplied by Nokia Siemens.

Nokia Siemens has also undertaken four of the total six GSM-R passenger-dedicated line projects in China that are under construction or have been put into operation. Notably, the Beijing-Tianjin Railway, supporting Beijing's big sports games in 2008, is the first high-speed railway with the maximum speed of 350kph. In addition, Nokia Siemens is the exclusive provider of Chinese GSM-R intelligent network and HLRi system. The GSM-R core network provided by Nokia Siemens will serve the main railway lines and bear over 50 percent of the wireless communicationtraffic on Chinese railways.