Agere, Huawei sign multimillion-dollar deal - News Flash

Electronic News, Oct 21, 2002 by Gale Morrison

CONTINUING TO PUT PRESSURE ON CISCO SYSTEMS, HUAWEI Technologies Co. Ltd., the leading network equipment supplier in China, has signed a multimillion-dollar agreement with Agere Systems Inc. to purchase a full suite of Agere ICs for use in optical networking systems for metropolitan and access networks.

Huawei is said to be the fastest-growing equipment supplier in the world. Bruised and battered communications IC makers have been throwing themselves at the Chinese market, Huawei in particular, especially with Cisco struggling and reducing the components it's purchasing.

Under the multimillion-dollar deal, Agere will provide chip for line cards, which handle multiple networking protocols, channels, reaches and rates in optical transport systems.

Mark Granahan, VP for access and transport products at Agere, said the company is the leading supplier of networking ICs to Huawei.

A recent RHK report ranked Huawei as top dog in the Asia/Pacific market with 15.4 percent market share in optical transport products in 2001. China is the largest telecommunications market in Asia/Pacific and is expected to continue to be the largest through at least 2006, RHK said. Huawei's sales outside China went up 156 percent last year.

"Huawei was seeking a long-term strategic partner in the industry to provide transport solutions to help us co-develop the worldwide market," said Pin-An Zhang, Huawei senior VP and general manager of the company's optical networking division, in a statement. "Agere came out on top by offering lowcost, highly reliable and feature-rich solutions that dramatically shorten the time-to-market for our Optix 2.5G,10G SDH and Optix Metro Systems."

Agere will provide Huawei with seven devices, including framers, pointer-processors, cross-connects, data engines and mixed signal transceivers. Among the optical transport chips Agere is supplying to Huawei are the MARS 2.5G and MARS l0G framers.

"This announcement extends Agere's already strong relationship with Huawei into other key networking application and product areas," said Frank Yi Liang, China country manager for Agere, in a statement. "Because of our extensive knowledge of optical networking technologies and our broad portfolio of intellectual property, we are the only company that can offer a complete line card solution."

Huawei is also using Agere's 8207 CelXpres asynchronous transfer mode switching chip in its multiservice access platform technology as well as Agere's ATM port controller processing chip in its broadband multiservice and access platforms.