Last month Alcatel-Lucent announced a welcome slice of good news: it had won a $1 billion managed services contract with Indian giant, Reliance Communications. Today it's been announced that the mirror image of that contract - for Reliance's wireline and wireless networks for North and West India - has been awarded to Ericsson.

Reliance now has two of the world's largest telecoms systems vendors competing toe-to-toe to deliver network management and "cost optimisation". The eight year Ericsson deal involves 100,000 km of fiber and mobile infrastructure in 11 telecom circles, across North and West of India, including Delhi and Mumbai.

As with Alcatel-Lucent a tranche of employees - in this case 5,000 - will be absorbed by Ericsson.

The announcement says Ericsson is to manage the day-to-day operations across wireline and wireless networks and will take over responsibility for field maintenance, network operations and operational planning of Reliance Communications 2G, CDMA and 3G mobile networks.

The parties say the deal will be driven by a service level agreement - Ericsson will be responsible for improving network performance and ultimately service quality as well as helping to identify and introduce new services into Reliance's network.