10 million GSM lines project: Work moving at snail pace
KATHMANDU, NOV 04 -
Nepal Telecom’s (NT) plan to aggressively expand its service across the country by adding 10 million GSM mobile lines is moving at a snail’s pace. Now, the state-owned company’s plan to start distribution of new mobile lines from the first quarter of 2013 seems virtually impossible.
Huawei Technologies, a Chinese telecommunication equipment vendor which is working on 4.8 million lines under Package B of the project, is making slow progress and NT is running out of mobile line stock.
At the same time, the NT board is taking more time to take a decision for signing agreement with Huawei for Package A — 5.2 million lines. “Even if Ericsson rejects Package A, the board is unwilling to issue a letter of intent (LoI) to Huawei soon, citing legal issues,” said a high-level NT official.
The official said since the matter was related only to Ericsson’s forfeiture of bid security, the board should decide about issuing the LoI to the Chinese vendor at the earliest to speed up work.
Ericsson’s writ petition to stop NT from seizing $4.6 million bid security is pending in the Supreme Court. Rejecting the package, Ericsson had said it would not be able to work at such a ‘low cost’. Prior to this, ZTE Corporation had refused to sign a contract for the package.
The 5.2 million lines package is targeted for Central, Eastern, Far Western and Mid-Western development regions, and the 4.8 million lines package is for the Kathmandu valley and Western development region.
The existing system capacity of NT allows it to distribute only 5.5 million lines (4.5 million lines from ZTE Corporation-installed network and 1 million lines of Huawei in the Far Western region). The Nepal Telecommunications Authority report says NT has already distributed over 600,000 additional lines beyond its original capacity.
“Huawei has been paid the first installment of $18 million, but it has installed only around a dozen network sites that will hardly be able to offer service for 15,000 new subscribers,” said the NT official. The officials added the NT board, top officials and other government officials associated might also cancel the Package A and expand services adding capacity of Huawei’s existing network in the Western part.
After eight months of delay, NT and Huawei had signed a contract for Package B at Rs 6.75 billion ($ 85 billion) last June. As per the contract, the Chinese vendor is responsible for completing installation of all equipment under the first phase within October, making it possible for NT to start distributing new lines within December this year.
Source: The Kathmandu Post
