Nokia-Siemens snares up to $400m NBN deal

Nokia-Siemens Networks has agreed to supply optical transmission kit to NBN Co in a deal that could be worth up to $400 million over ten years.

The networking vendor has initially won a $10 million purchase order for "test laboratory equipment and systems to support early release sites".

Optical transmission equipment will be used to provide connectivity between fibre access nodes, aggregation sites and points of interconnect (POIs).

Nokia-Siemens said that NBN Co's transmission network "required connectivity at 10, 40 and 100 Gbps."

"The network building stage of the project will span for ten years with the bulk of the optical transmission network being rolled out in the first three years," it said in a statement.

Nokia-Siemens Networks joined Alcatel-Lucent as major networking vendors to have won work in the next-generation network project.

NBN Co awarded an initial $70 million contract to Alcatel-Lucent in June for the supply of gigabit passive optical network (GPON) and Ethernet aggregation kit.

Nokia-Siemens Networks also won a major contract with VHA Australia earlier this year that saw it consolidate the core networks of Vodafone and Hutchison 3 into one - ripping out the Ericsson kit that backed Hutchison's 3G network in the process. It beat rivals Ericsson and Huawei to secure that contract.