KATHMANDU, DEC 24 - 2012
Nepal Telecom (NT) has formally invited telecommunication equipment vendor Huawei Technologies to sign an agreement for 5.2 million mobile lines. The state-owned telecom giant said it issued a letter of acceptance to the Chinese firm on Friday asking it to conclude a contract within 15 days.
The proposed deal is Package A of NT’s mega project to distribute 10 million mobile lines. The Chinese vendor had quoted US$ 122 million for the project. Under this package, NT will distribute new mobile lines in the Central, Eastern, Far Western and Mid-Western development regions.
Huawei has also won the contract for Package B under which 4.8 million lines will be distributed to customers in the Kathmandu valley and the Western Development Region.
“We will be signing a contract with Huawei for 5.2 million lines soon,” said Guna Kesari Pradhan, NT spokesperson. Under this mega project, NT will have a capacity to distribute 5 million 2G lines, 4.5 million 3G lines and 500,000 4G service lines. As per the tender condition, the Chinese vendor will supply the telecom equipment, install it and make the NT network capable of adding 10 million new users by 2015.
The current system capacity of NT allows it to add only 5.5 million lines, but it has distributed 600,000 more lines than the upper limit. The company had long been planning to add capacity to cater to the growing demand from customers and compete with private sector operators like Ncell.
NT officials said that the project would help expand 3G service in a big way with customers slowly being attracted to mobile data service and the tariff rate coming down. They said that for expensive 3G enabled handsets and data service, NT had suffered a loss in the 3G service business in the early years. The company launched 3G service in 2007 and has been able to attract only 112,000 customers till date.
Earlier, NT had planned to implement the 10 million line project through two vendors by breaking it into two packages to ensure effective implementation and avoid dependency on a single vendor. However, with the other bidders ZTE Corporation and Ericsson refusing to accept Package A for cost reasons, NT had approached Huawei to do it.
In June, NT signed a contract with Huawei for Package B for Rs 6.74 billion (US$ 85 million). Pradhan said that Huawei had completed installation of the core network system and started work on installation of mobile towers for the 4.8 million lines. She added that the company planned to start distributing new mobile lines by mid-July 2013.
Source: The Kathmandu Post
Nepal Telecom (NT) has formally invited telecommunication equipment vendor Huawei Technologies to sign an agreement for 5.2 million mobile lines. The state-owned telecom giant said it issued a letter of acceptance to the Chinese firm on Friday asking it to conclude a contract within 15 days.
The proposed deal is Package A of NT’s mega project to distribute 10 million mobile lines. The Chinese vendor had quoted US$ 122 million for the project. Under this package, NT will distribute new mobile lines in the Central, Eastern, Far Western and Mid-Western development regions.
Huawei has also won the contract for Package B under which 4.8 million lines will be distributed to customers in the Kathmandu valley and the Western Development Region.
“We will be signing a contract with Huawei for 5.2 million lines soon,” said Guna Kesari Pradhan, NT spokesperson. Under this mega project, NT will have a capacity to distribute 5 million 2G lines, 4.5 million 3G lines and 500,000 4G service lines. As per the tender condition, the Chinese vendor will supply the telecom equipment, install it and make the NT network capable of adding 10 million new users by 2015.
The current system capacity of NT allows it to add only 5.5 million lines, but it has distributed 600,000 more lines than the upper limit. The company had long been planning to add capacity to cater to the growing demand from customers and compete with private sector operators like Ncell.
NT officials said that the project would help expand 3G service in a big way with customers slowly being attracted to mobile data service and the tariff rate coming down. They said that for expensive 3G enabled handsets and data service, NT had suffered a loss in the 3G service business in the early years. The company launched 3G service in 2007 and has been able to attract only 112,000 customers till date.
Earlier, NT had planned to implement the 10 million line project through two vendors by breaking it into two packages to ensure effective implementation and avoid dependency on a single vendor. However, with the other bidders ZTE Corporation and Ericsson refusing to accept Package A for cost reasons, NT had approached Huawei to do it.
In June, NT signed a contract with Huawei for Package B for Rs 6.74 billion (US$ 85 million). Pradhan said that Huawei had completed installation of the core network system and started work on installation of mobile towers for the 4.8 million lines. She added that the company planned to start distributing new mobile lines by mid-July 2013.
Source: The Kathmandu Post
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