The Hindu Business Line : ITI questions MTNL contract to Huawei

DESPITE falling short of the pre-requisite tender norms for supplying CDMA equipment to Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) for its limited mobility (WLL) services, Chinese telecom equipment provider Huawei Technologies Ltd has been granted the contract for eight lakh lines in Delhi and Mumbai valued at Rs 280 crore.

Telecom PSU ITI Ltd, which too participated in the bid in partnership with another Chinese company - ZTE Corporation - has lodged a formal complaint with MTNL asking it to verify all the facts that have been provided by Huawei before the equipment is deployed.

In a letter written to the MTNL Chairman and Managing Director, Mr R.S.P. Sinha, a copy of which is available with Business Line, ITI noted that Huawei had provided incorrect information to participate in the bid.

The company had claimed that it had already supplied CDMA equipment to Chinese telecom major China Unicom for two lakh lines while in reality it catered to only one lakh lines. As per the pre-requisite for the tender, the bidder should have experience to supply two lakh lines at the time of tendering.

Further, the MTNL team consisting of four members who had gone to China to verify the claims made by Huawei in its bid documents regarding its case history did not visit the actual factory sites. As such its report on supplies and reliability of the networks supplied by the company to the telecom operator China Unicom cannot be accurate.

The MTNL team stayed in China for only four days and in such a short time, it is "practically impossible" to examine and verify the two lakh lines distributed in the whole of the network

"We would like to bring to your notice that the visit was only confined to one branch office of China Unicom, where no proper and exact information could be gathered. Instead of visiting the head office of China Unicom based in Beijing and meeting with the top officials to verify the claims, the team only visited a branch office. Further language being a major problem, the question that comes to mind is how did the MTNL team manage to get exact information from these local officials," the letter notes.

The company has only supplied CDMA switches to China Unicom and not the base stations as was required by the MTNL tender. As evidence of its allegations, ITI has also provided documents consisting of distribution of China Unicom network in the country. MTNL officials could not be contacted for their reaction.

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