Announced Monday, Motorola said it secured the contracts from Taiwan's Far EasTone Telecom (FET), which controls about one third of Taiwan's local wireless mobile market. The ambitious M-Taiwan project is planned to cover Taipei County's two largest cities, Jhonghe and Banciao, with WiMax, Wi-Fi, and 3G technologies, building over FET's existing mobile infrastructure.

Motorola, which has been making an aggressive drive in WiMax, said its contracts with FET are the largest WiMax contracts in Taiwan.

"Underlying the M-Taiwan project is a complete WiMax ecosystem to create a city-wide broadband network in order to roll out integrated mobile servies," said Jeffey Gee, FET's executive VP of network technology, in a statement. "We have turned to Motorola for its expertise to design, supply, and deploy a world-class network that will support a multivendor environment."

Simon Leung, president of Motorola Asia Pacific, said the WiMax network deployment is the largest to get under way in Taiwan. The first part of the two-phase deployment will begin later this month and be completed by the end of the year; the second phase is scheduled for completion early next year.

FET, which has 6.4 million subscribers, has said its work in the M-Taiwan Project is intended to provide a range of multimedia services for home media centers, VoIP, IMS, security, and hotspot advertising features -- all in a WiMax wireless environment.