Nortel (News - Alert) has landed a $100 million contract with India's BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.), to put mobile connectivity in the hands of millions of new subscribers in the southern area of the country. The deployment of the BSNL network expansion is already underway and is expected to be completed towards the end of 2008.
Based on Nortel's previous track record in helping BSNL establish the widest reach of any wireless network provider in India, BSNL chose Nortel to support this southern GSM network expansion with a very aggressive roll-out schedule. Thanks to Nortel, BSNL can build on, and maximize its existing network investment and rapidly extend mobile services to new subscribers.
Hitesh Lokhandwala, managing director, Nortel India said in a statement that since 2004, Nortel has worked closely with BSNL in rolling out mobile service to some seven million customers in the southern and eastern parts of India while ensuring the network is cost-effective and implemented according to BSNL's aggressive timelines.
He emphasized that this new contract award reflects BSNL's confidence in Nortel to achieve these targets, and is further proof that in one of the most competitive, dynamic and fastest-growing markets in the world, Nortel's solutions meet customers' requirements.
Richard Lowe, president, Carrier Networks, Nortel noted that India represents an enormous opportunity for Nortel in the carrier space, with its consistently high growth rates and increasingly mobile population.
Lowe said that the company has redesigned its GSM portfolio with this kind of opportunity in mind, making the solution much more cost competitive, without compromising the performance, capacity and coverage for which Nortel is renowned.
“Nortel offers an immediate solution for today's high-growth markets, and a clear migration path to 4G as operators across India eye the evolution of their networks to offer higher-bandwidth services in the near future,” he added
Nortel was in news earlier this week for announcing a contract from the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS (News - Alert) awarded a one-year, estimated six million dollar IT services contract extension to Nortel Government Solutions to support the PostalOne! automated mail handling system.
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