The Hindu Business Line : Nokia Siemens bags BSNL rural contract

New Delhi, Oct. 11 In a bid to enhance its network capacity, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd has awarded two different contracts to Nokia Siemens and UTStarcom. While the contract for Nokia Siemens is for rolling out broadband access across 7,000 villages, the second is for supply of core equipment that will strengthen BSNL’s backbone to carry high capacity traffic.

High bandwidth

The Nokia Siemens contract is part of a Greenfield rural tender from BSNL. The new access network’s high bandwidth will allow BSNL to deliver high data and triple play intensive services such as video on demand, video multi cast, IPTV, video conferencing and virtual private network to its customers.

The network will also enable BSNL to provide connectivity to CSCs (Community Service Centres) and other e-governance locations.

The BSNL project envisages connecting a total of 20,000 villages. Chinese manufacturer ZTE is understood to be the other equipment supplier for this project.

BSNL had earlier launched a similar roll-out for offering broadband in urban areas, which is being implemented by Nokia Siemens, UTStarcom and ZTE.

Nokia Siemens Networks will also supply end-user devices that will enable BSNL to provide speeds of up to 24Mbps for broadband subscribers over its existing copper infrastructure. The first phase of new lines deployment will be completed by the first quarter of 2008. The contract value is estimated to be around $20 million.

For enhancing the backbone infrastructure, UTStarcom will supply its Metro Ethernet Forum-certified NetRing 10000i STM-64 optical transport solution to BSNL.

This will essentially enable BSNL to handle high bandwidth demand from both cellular and broadband users especially for services such as mobile TV and IPTV.

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