Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) today announced a series of contracts totaling $107 million with China Unicom's provincial subsidiaries in Zhejiang, Shaanxi and Liaoning for their CDMA network expansion projects.

Lucent will supply its CDMA2000 solutions to improve the capacity and coverage of Unicom's mobile networks in the three provinces. Lucent Worldwide Services, Lucent's services arm, will support these network deployments.

With this expansion, China Unicom hopes to be able to offer new revenue-generating services such as video-on-demand, live streaming audio and high-speed mobile Internet access to its subscribers. Because Lucent's equipment can be upgraded to support more advanced third-generation (3G) services, these deployments also will lay a foundation for the future evolution to 3G.