In a move which probably wont surprise industry watchers, India's Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has decided to delay the date for opening its monster US$6.5 billion tender for GSM infrastructure kit. The bids were due to be opened on July 16 - but will now not be opened until August 30th. BSNL has a track record of delaying, amending and renegotiating its GSM network tenders - but this time put the blame firmly at the flood of interest in the tender.

A senior company official said, “We got no less than 21,000 queries from the vendors after the draft tender was put on the BSNL Web site. We need time to address their clarifications. Therefore, the 93-million line tender, which was supposed to be opened on July 16, will now open on August 30.”

The US$6.5 billion price tag is based on a US$70 cost per GSM line - and the tender is for a total of 93 million GSM lines. The highly convoluted 13 million GSM lines tender last year was won by Ericsson who won the bid with an offer at US$90 per line. The government, which owns BSNL has however capped the network expenditure for this financial year at US$4.7 billion - of which at least US$500 million has already been allocated to a CDMA contract.

The original tender document stated that only companies with a turnover exceeding US$2 billion for the past two years and deployments of at least 20 million GSM lines - excluding any prior sales to BSNL - could participate in the contract bid. This did however still permit China's ZTE and Huawei to tender for the contract, both of whom had been refused permission to bid in earlier contracts.

While the contract is for 93 million GSM lines, no one bidder will be able to win more than 50 million lines - and will be committed to offering replacement parts and maintenance for at least seven years. The tender document splits the allocation into four sections - three of 25 million lines for the North, West and South - with 18 million lines for the East. Of the total, some 21 million lines must be provisioned for 3G services as well as GSM - which is technically not an issue, but it would push up the costs for the suppliers.

A controversial clause which had required suppliers to be profitable has been removed as it would have excluded the likes of Motorola and Alcatel Lucent. Another clause was added though - requiring the bidders to have the ability to design/manufacture their own Radio Access Network kit - and not outsource that to 3rd party suppliers.

To fight growing competition, BSNL is looking to add at least 100 million GSM mobile subscribers by 2010. According to figures from the Mobile World database, the operator ended the first half of this year with some 37.36 million GSM subscribers - along with around 176,000 CDMA users.

Source:cellular-news