Nepal Telecom sending LoA to Huawei next week
KATHMANDU, DEC 11 -
Nepal Telecom (NT) is all set to invite Chinese telecom equipment vendor Huawei Technologies to sign an agreement for 5.2 million mobile lines. Officials of the state-owned telecom operator said that they would dispatch a letter of acceptance (LoA) to the vendor by early next week for the purpose.
The 5.2-million line under package A worth $122 million of the NT’s mega project of adding 10 million mobile lines. As part of preparation, NT last week had issued letter of intent to Huawei, publishing a notice to other vendors participating in the bid to file complain if any within a week.
A senior official at NT said chances of getting objection are slim given that other participating firms—ZTE Corporation and Ericsson—faced seizure of bid bond of $4.6 million for being unable to accept the project legally. “We will sign the contract with Huawei within a month,” he added.
Normally, NT allows vendors two weeks’ time to sign an agreement after issuing an LoA, according to Rajesh Joshi, an NT spokesperson. NT had approached Huawei after ZTE and Ericsson refused to undertake the package A.
Earlier, NT had planed to assign two different packages of the 10-million line project to two separate vendors for effective implementation. The contract for the package A was originally won by ZTE, but the Chinese vendor pulled out after NT turned down its request to raise the implementation cost for 5.2-million line project.
In June, NT had awarded package B with a capacity of 4.8 million lines to Huawei, which was the lowest bidder at $85 million. Package A of the mega project is targeted for Central, Eastern, Far-western and Mid-western development regions, whereas package B is in the Kathmandu valley and Western development region.
The NT official said each of the two packages consists 45 percent 3G and 5 percent 4G lines and that NT was targeting to start distribution of new lines under package B before mid-July. NT’s plan on 4G line distribution, however, is likely to get delayed with the government yet to decide on the band frequency, price and amount of spectrum to be assigned to the operators. About two years ago, both NT and Ncell had urged the government to allocate 4G spectrum.
In the new spectrum policy unveiled last month, the Ministry of Information and Communications had stated that a committee under it would study the 4G and recommend the spectrum band, minimum frequency to be assigned to operators and its fee based on the international practice. However, no such committee has been formed so far.
Source: The Kathmandu Post
