The technology is expected to reduce PBTL's operating cost by 90 percent with minimal power consumption, very little installation space and other key factors.

This deployment will be the second of its kind in South Asia, as Tata Telecom installed the first soft-switch, also from Motorola, in India last year.

PBTL closed this vendor-financed $50 million deal in April 2004 and Motorola officially announced it last week. Soft-switch will enable PBTL deploying enhanced CDMA20000 1X technology" to bundle voice, data and multimedia services to its existing and additional 500,000 subscribers.

Soft-switch replaces the very expensive conventional digital telephone exchanges both in fixed and mobile applications. The legacy exchanges are proprietary but soft-switch is composed of widely available off-the-shelf technologies.

Equipment of Sun Microsystems and Sonus will be deployed at the critical stages of its network.

The Motorola soft-switch eliminates PBTL's sole dependency on the equipment maker for spares and after sales supports.

This new packet-based switching solution also offers the deployment of Push-To-Talk over Cellular (PoC) solution. This innovative and low-cost derivative of cellular mobile technology is gaining momentum in the worldwide GSM and CDMA mobile markets.

"The new CDMA2000 1X network will prepare PBTL for future growth, as well as enable it to harness latest mobile services such as PoC as new revenue streams," said Simon Leung, Motorola's senior vice president and general manager of Asia Pacific.

"Subscribers can also look forward to PoC service that will enable them to connect with one or many others at the push of a button via handsets designed to incorporate this feature," Leung commented.

It may be noted that GrameenPhone, the largest mobile operators, is also planning to launch similar services using General Packet Radio Systems (GPRS) by September. Ericsson is the end-to-end supplier of this technology, which is expected to fuel competition in the untapped mobile multimedia market of Bangladesh.