The country?s second largest telecom operator, state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), on Wednesday received bids from six global telecom vendors for its 93 million lines tender floated earlier this year. Additionally, 10 stand-alone infrastructure companies have put in bids for the infrastructure segment. The line expansion has been branded as the world?s largest in the world.
The equipment vendors include, Nokia Siemens, Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Nortel and ZTE. However, Motorola, which was rejected on technical grounds from participating in a similar BSNL bid floated in 2006, did not put in its bid this time.
GTL, Nextra Telecom, Acme Telepowers, Suzana Towers and KEC International were a few of the companies that bid for the infrastructure segment.
The 93 million lines tender has been divided into four parts — mobile constituting 2G and 3G, infrastructure and IT. The bids for the IT parts would be opened on September 30.
Kuldeep Goyal, CMD BSNL said, ?We can?t give a specific date but by early next year we hope to place the orders?. Goyal refused to comment on what could be the value of the orders in value terms. However, according to industry analysts the estimated value of the order would be close to $8-9 billion. Last year when BSNL placed an order for 25 million GSM lines, the L1 rate was at $90 per line.
Goyal said that each vendor could place bids for 50 million lines of the 93 million lines each and that three to four companies would be bidding for each zone. Further, 25 million lines each would be for the north, west and the south zones, while 18 million would be for the east zone. 25 million lines of the total would be for 3G services.
At the end of June, BSNL had a total mobile subscriber base of about 38 million. While the country?s largest telecom company Bharti Airtel recorded a base of 72 million.
Kuldeep Goyal had earlier told FE that the company was hoping to catch-up with Vodafone, the country?s second largest GSM operator, which recorded a subscriber base of over 50 million in the same month.
Through this expansion, BSNL will also introduce value added services, mobile broadband, MMS, location based services.
