IndiaWatch: Bharti Identifies LTE Vendors?

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October 13, 2011
Ankush Sharma
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Bharti Airtel Ltd., Department of Telecommunications and Blackberry-maker Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) are the top news-makers in this news digest from India's telecom sector.

Bharti Airtel is said to have identified its vendor suppliers to help roll-out LTE services soon, reports The Economic Times. According to the report, Kolkata circle would be awarded to ZTE Corp. while the Karnataka circle would be managed by Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.. Bharti's long term vendor associates Ericsson ABand Nokia Siemens Networks are likely to get the Punjab and Maharashtra circles respectively. (See IndiaWatch: Bharti Chooses ZTE for 4G rollout?.)

The DoT has cautioned state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) against awarding contracts to Chinese gear-makers ZTE and Huawei for its project of 15 million GSM connections worth INR 50 billion (US$1.02 billion), reports The Economic Times. BSNL had restricted these vendors to internal regions and decided not to award them contracts in regions that border sensitive areas such as the North-East India and Pakistan. But India's security agencies are not keen on BSNL deploying the Chinese firms' equipment anywhere in the country because of the vendors' ability to remotely access voice and data communications running over their equipment, thereby posing a security risk. (See India's Security Hogwash, BSNL Issues RFP For LTE-Ready Gear and .)

The Blackberry outage, which has affected more than 1 million users across Asia/Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, has resulted in rival services such as Nimbuzz Group receiving a jump in registrations from frustrated customers in India, reports The Hindu Business Line. The outage, caused by the failure of a core switch and its back-up switch not functioning as tested, has resulted in no Blackberry Messenger (BBM) access while emails are taking as much as 25-30 hours to get delivered. (See .)

Even when Telecom minister Kapil Sibal announced the draft National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2011 with a promise to give less priority to revenue generation, the Government has taken immediate steps to enrich its earnings by raising the uniform license fee to 8.5 percent from the current 6 percent, reports The Times of India. (See NTP 2011: An Open Letter to the Telecom Minister and IndiaWatch: Draft NTP Permits Voice Resale.)

Ankush Sharma, Copy Editor, Light Reading India

	Yes, the combined entity can bargain better rates from vendors and hence will improve profitability
	No, merger of two loss making PSUs is not going to help
	May be, but first they need to resolve employee and other issues
	Not sure

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IndiaWatch: Bharti Identifies LTE Vendors?

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