India's Reliance Communications has contracted ZTE to deploy a 100G OTN in Pune and Hyderabad for mobile backhaul.
The three-year contract covers network design, engineering, installation, operations and maintenance services.
RCom plans to use the network to relieve LTE bandwidth requirement pressures and meet the region's soaring demand for data.
RCom is India's fourth largest operator with a market share of around 14.35%. The company is increasingly pursuing co-operation with Reliance Industries' Reliance Jio Infocomm on 4G infrastructure sharing.
Announcing the deal, ZTE said it has to date completed more than 200 100G OTN deployments worldwide and deployed a 100G line length of over 200,000km.
RCom said it had selected ZTE in large part because of the low total cost of ownership the Chinese vendor could provide.
The operator is rumored to be pursuing a merger with Sistema Shyam Teleservices, the Sistema-owned joint venture that operates the MTS India mobile brand. Recent reports suggests that a deal could be reached by the end of the month, although on-the-record the companies have denied the development.