Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd has floated a fresh tender for procuring wireless equipment based on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology for supporting 2.5 million lines.

The tender requirements are as follows:

• Bidders should be Indian companies who will act on behalf of foreign manufacturers.
• Bidder and the foreign company should have experience to supply minimum 1 million lines of CDMA equipment such as mobile switching centre, base stations and core network equipment.

Major bidders including Lucent, Nortel, Motorola, Ericsson and ZTE is expected to bid for the project in association with an Indian partner. Earlier, BSNL has scrapped an order for over 1 million CDMA wireless lines which is placed on Chinese manufacturer Huawei due to delays in delivery and Huawei had partnered with Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd for the project.

The tender, which will open on April 25, is for the latest in CDMA technology called Evolution Data Optimized (EVDO). The technology is been deployed by private CDMA-based operators Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices and offers one of the fastest, fully mobile wireless Internet data solutions on the market.

At present, BSNL has nearly 2.2 million subscribers using WLL (mobile) services adding nearly 60,000 new users in January 2006.

Also see:

BSNL to invite GSM tender by March 2006 (27-Feb-06)