NEW DELHI, INDIA: ZTE Corporation, a global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, announced that it has topped the WCDMA Network Testing conducted by China Unicom in 77 cities across China recently.

The WCDMA network tests were conducted by China Unicom to determine the efficiency and rank equipment vendors in terms of the network's Ideal Index. Of the 77 cities tested for WCDMA, 30 cities achieved the Ideal Index and ZTE, Huawei and Ericsson respectively were ranked as the top three vendors in these Ideal Index cities.

All of the existing top five telecom equipment suppliers including ZTE, Huawei, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia-Siemens participated in the tests. From August 31 to September 18, 2009, the WCDMA tests were carried out in three batches to evaluate network coverage and quality.

The tests were conducted by China Unicom's Operation & Maintenance Division that employed third-party testing methods to evaluate the WCDMA network performance in 77 cities including 55 key and 22 non-key cities.

Of the key cities tested, 18 out of 55 achieved an Ideal Index ranking, including seven cities that utilize ZTE's network and equipment, nine with Huawei and two with Ericsson. ZTE attained the highest ratio on network Ideal Index and seven cities out of 10 cities under it attained the Ideal Index, accounting for 70 percent of its network involved in the testing.

This makes it the top provider that made the highest Ideal Index, followed by Huawei's 47 percent. 

In all the 77 tested cities, 30 cities reached the network's Ideal Index ranking, with 10 out of 14 ZTE networks achieving this highest level of ranking, representing a total of 71.4 percent network Ideal Index, followed by Huawei's 52 percent and Ericsson's 27 percent.