Africa Cellulaire (Africell) Burundi has awarded Alcatel-Lucent a US$20 million deal to deliver a complete nationwide GSM/EDGE network.

According to the agreement, which was signed by the two parties at ITU Africa Telecom 2008, held in Cairo, Egypt, last week, the $20 million takes care of the first phase, which should be delivered within three years.

Under the agreement, Alcatel will deploy an end-to-end GSM/EDGE (Global System for Mobile Communications/Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) network, including base station sub-system (BSS), mobile switching centers, and network applications.

According to a statement, Alcatel will be solely responsible for the maintenance of the operator's network.

Africell Burundi is a subsidiary of VTEL Holdings, a Dubai-based telecommunications company. VTEL acquired Africell in a January 2008 transaction. Africell possesses a GSM and WiMax license.

"Burundi is a very important market for VTEL, given its existing growth potential, and we are quite positive that Alcatel's state-of-the-art GSM/EDGE solutions will enable us to achieve our objective of bringing advanced mobile telephony to parts of Burundi it has not reached before," said Nour Atout, VTEL's CEO for Africa.