EricssonN, Siemens, Motorola, Nokia and ZTE were the only five companies which submitted bids for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd’s (BSNL) mega 45.5 million line GSM tender. Earlier, 18 companies, which included the likes of Lucent, Cisco, HP, Sun Microsystem, Nortel, Huawei, etc, had bought the tender documents. The technical bids of the five companies were opened on Monday and after their evaluation, which BSNL officials said would take about a month’s time, the financial bids would be opened. Officials said that financial bids of only those companies would be opened who qualify in the technical round. Earlier, BSNL had twice extended the date for submission of the bids as vendors wanted more time to understand the details sought. Most vendors had found the conditionalities in the tender document too stringent and industry sources said that perhaps that’s why many did not submit their bids. The tender is important as it’s one of the largest expansion of GSM network by BSNL with the total investment of about Rs 21,000 crore. As per the criteria fixed by BSNL, 60% of the order would go to the lowest bidder and 40% cent of the contract would be given to the second lowest. BSNL is planning to add over 63.5 million GSM lines of which 18 million lines contract has gone to ITI, under the reserved quota for PSUs. ITI has a technical tie-up with French equipment supplier Alcatel. The contract is a mix of 2G and 3G technologies.
