Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd has shorlisted Swedish telecom equipment vendor Ericsson and Chinese Huawei for its grand 93 million lines GSM and 3G network expansion project in India. The estimated worth of the project is around $6 billion and is the biggest telecom contract in the world.
While Ericsson has been shortlisted for North and East zones, Huawei has qualified for West, East and South zones. Other bidders, including ZTE, Nokia Siemens and Alcatel Lucent, have been disqualified on technical grounds. Some of the vendors disqualified, including Nokia Siemens, have supplied equipment to BSNL earlier
Since only one vendor qualified for each of the three zones, they are expected to be awarded the contract after getting required clearance from Ministry of Home Affairs. It is worth mentioning here that Ministry of Home Affairs has the veto power in awarding all telecom equipment contracts based on the security concerns related to the operators. Indian Ministry of Home Affairs showed special reservations on the Chinese based vendor Huawei. Since there is no competition in the bidding process, the required clearance from the Home ministry will pave the way for opening of the bids and hence awarding the contracts.
BSNL has already showed its desire in a written letter to ministry to allow it to open the Ericsson contract without waiting for the report from ministry as it faces a lot of network expansion issues in north and Ericsson is already an established vendor on its network. Keep in mind the fact that BSNL has been adding only 1 million new users every month while rest of the private operators have been adding approximately 2.5 million new users every month to their network. Therefore, BSNL urgently needs to catch up with other operators at this growth stage of Indian telecom market.
Update: The Indian communication ministry has ordered BSNL to test Huawei equipment for t be tested for trapdoors, blackboxes, malwares, and also, if it is susceptible to remote hacking before they can be allowed to be operational. The Department of Telecom (DoT), in a communication to BSNL’s chairman and managing director Kuldeep Goyal, has also said that the telco should completely take over the maintenance of its networks from foreign operators within a time frame of not less than two years. The DoT has also told BSNL that networks provided by Huawei should not have remote access. Remote access (RA) means monitoring the data and voice traffic from remote locations in India and abroad. Already Huawei has been barred from operating in the North zone as Northern zone is considered a sensitive area by India because it shares border with Nepal, China and Pakistan. The red tape will seriously affect the Huawei from capturing sizable chunk in one of the world biggest potential market. [via IndiaTimes]
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