China Telecom has awarded a contract to Alcatel-Lucent for the supply and maintenance of an IP-multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) backbone across 10 provinces of the country.

China Telecom has awarded a contract to Alcatel-Lucent for the supply and maintenance of an IP-multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) backbone across 10 provinces of the country. The deployment is likely to be completed by October 2009, following which the operator will be able to offer broadband services including IPTV, Web TV and virtual private networks (VPNs).