Swedish telecommunications group Ericsson recently signed a contract with a mobile phone company in central China's Hubei Province for GSM network expansion.

The contracted investment of 90.61 million US dollars will go toward upgrading the local mobile phone system to 55,872 channels, which will be large enough to accommodate 1.58 million subscribers. The capacity will meet the demand by 2001.

The province introduced the mobile phone system in 1995. Since then, it has been improved four times to satisfy the swift increase in users, which went up by 40,000 per month this year.