Alcatel-Lucent has approached BSNL to offer equipment for BSNL’s mega GSM tender for 93 million GSM lines at the price quoted by Huawei, says a Business Line report. Alcatel-Lucent has put the offer through its alliance with Indian Telephone Industries (ITI).

The report does not mentions if the offer is for all the four zones or for those zones where Ericsson has been selected or instead for those where Huawei has been selected. For the West zone no vendors have been selected till now.

As per the report, Huawei’s price for per GSM line is Rs 2,600. Last week, BSNL CMD had stated that the firm has already given a 9 million order to the Chinese vendor. Negotiations with Ericsson are going on as there is still scope for price reduction feels BSNL.

Recent developments suggest that BSNL is playing mind games to put pressure on Ericsson for the ongoing negotiations. For even if one were to believe that Alcatel-Lucent-ITI combine indeed submitted their bids now, it is highly unlikely that BSNL can accept such offers now. Because if BSNL accepts the offers now it makes the whole process of floating a tender useless. It maybe remembered that Alcatel-Lucent was disqualified on technical grounds like other companies such as ZTE and NSN.   

Recently there was another development on the issue with the DoT suggesting that BSNL should go for re-tendering.

The delay in procuring telecom equipments however is ultimately affecting BSNL as many of its exchanges all over the country face acute shortage of network capacity.

The prolonged negotiations process with Ericsson also raises questions over BSNL’s selection process which left the company with no choice in most of the zones.