Six vendors bid for $9 billion BSNL tender

Six telecom vendors have put in bids for the biggest Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) tender, worth $9 billion. Motorola was not one of them.

The six that put in bids are Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Network, Huawei, ZTE, Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel. The mega contract is for 93 million GSM lines in the four zones. Kuldeep Goyal, BSNL chairman and MD, said that orders for the first phase of the 93 million lines would be out by early 2009. “Three to four vendors have applied in each of the four zones. Two of the six vendors have applied for all four zones,” he said, declining to name them.

Goyal said he expected the cost per line would be less than the $107 per line quoted by vendors in the last tender. BSNL expects the price to be below $100.

The tender is divided into four components: 2G lines, 3G lines, infrastructure and operating & business support systems (OSS and BSS).

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