NT to purchase ZTE equipment
KATHMANDU, OCT 15 -
Nepal Telecom ( NT ) is preparing to buy telecom equipment worth around Rs 60 million from China’s ZTE Corporation in a bid to improve quality of service. The equipment or spare parts to be procured would be installed in the mobile towers.
The NT , which had initially planned to hire ZTE Corp as a consultant for a six-month term to improve the quality, decided to carry out the task on its own by purchasing necessary equipment. The Chinese company had proposed an estimated Rs 250 million for the job.
Surya Prasal Silwal, secretary at the Ministry of Information and Communications, said that the NT would soon open a letter of credit to buy the spare parts. “With the NT technical officials showing commitment, we will hand over the job of installing the equipment for improving service quality to them,” said Silwal, who is also the chairman of NT Board.
As around 80 percent of NT ’s mobile network is covered by the equipment supplied by the ZTE, the telecom operator has decided to procure procure the equipment from the same company for necessary replacement of spare parts in towers and their maintenance.
A sub-committee headed by Baikuntha Aryal, joint secretary at the Ministry of Finance, had also negotiated with the ZTE on service management, network optimisation works for service improvement and consultancy fee. The sub-committee submitted a report to the NT board on the QoS improvement involving consultant or through own technical officials of NT .
With its service quality often being called into question, the state-owned telecom giant had for the first time planned to hire the ZTE for quality improvement work. But the cost proposed by the ZTE was much higher, according to an NT official, and high-level technical officials made objection to the plan of the board and the management.
NT ’s preparation to depute its own technical officials in the service improvement is also aimed at avoiding possible dependency on consultants in the future. Reliable sources at NT say hiring of ZTE for improvement of network would mean it may have to depend on Huawei Technologies for similar work in the future. Currently, Huawei is working on NT ’s 4.8 million GSM mobile line project.
However, some within the NT doubt in-house technical officials’ ability to improve service. “Sooner or later, the company has to hire a third party consultant to maintain service quality,” a source said.
Source: The Kathmandu Post
