The Hindu Business Line : BSNL's tender for CDMA lines draws flak from Lucent, Nortel

BHARAT Sanchar Nigam Ltd's (BSNL) tendering process for procuring one million CDMA lines has come under fire from two North American equipment providers, which are complaining that the terms and conditions of the project favours Chinese manufacturers.

The US-based Lucent Technologies has written a letter to the State-owned company saying that the standards specified by BSNL was favouring Chinese vendor, ZTE. "The tender seems to be highly biased in favour of the incumbent supplier, ZTE, and has been based on theoretical aspects of the technology rather than the market reality. I would request BSNL to re-examine this tender thoroughly so that the new bidders can get a fair chance of success," Mr C.S. Rao, President and Chief Executive Officer, Lucent Technologies, has said.BSNL officials when contacted said that the tender was prepared as per procurement guidelines laid for the public sector undertaking and there was no question of playing favourites. They also said that BSNL would go for the latest technology available.

The Canada-based Nortel Networks has also asked BSNL to relax the standardisation norms.

The primary concern of the two companies is that BSNL has asked for setting up CDMA network based on an international standard called the IOS standard. According to Lucent and Nortel, which do not support the IOS standard, more than 60 per cent of the CDMA networks around the world do not run on the BSNL-specified standard.

Lucent has also objected to the clause in the tender which makes it mandatory for the supplier to set up equipment that would be inter-operable with BSNL's existing CDMA network. ZTE has supplied a significant part of BSNL's existing network. "This is a restrictive clause as inter-operability in CDMA technology is in its early stage and most vendors would not be able to comply. This also provides unfair price advantage to ZTE," said Lucent.

ZTE officials said that it was for BSNL to clarify any objections.