BSNL awards Rs 8000 crore telecom contract to Sterlite Tech Technology and Equipment

Sterlite Technologies, a Vedanta group company, state-run ITI Ltd and construction firm L&T have jointly acquired nearly Rs 8,000 crore worth of contracts from BSNL.

The companies will be engaged in delivering and handling end-to-end stationing of an optical fibre cable backbone for a vast telecom network that state-run BSNL is setting up for India’s armed forces. Sterlite bagged a Rs 1,950 crore advance purchase order (APO) to supply OFC in Jammu & Kashmir, Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and northeast.

Furthermore, it has signed a Rs 500 crore deal to manage the future optic fibre netrwok in J&K for seven years.

According to Anand Agarwal, chief executive officer at Sterlite Technologies - Apart from supplying fibre optic cables in the western states, Assam and northeast, Sterlite Tech will also handle end-to-end stationing, involving design, engineering, set up and maintenance of the OFC network in J&K.

ITI sequentially received an APO worth Rs 2,984.50 crore from BSNL to handle optic fibre network stationing in eastern and northeast states for the defence ministry telecom project.

Engineering and construction firm L&T has reportedly secured a RS 2,442 crore deal from BSNL for constituting an optical fibre cable network in particular areas that will form an optical national long distance backbone and optical connection line for the armed forces. According to a top BSNL executive, the APOs had been settled with “Sterlite, L&T and ITI.”

The defence telecom project is significant since the armed forces will migrate all their communication requirements to this alternate optic fibre and free more bandwidth for commercial telephony. Already some 3G airwaves were freed by armed forces in August 2010 right after it was assured that the telecom department would keep its side of the deal in establishing an alternate communications network, this had facilitated DoT to auction 3G airwaves four years back. The vast communications network that BSNL will build for the armed forces has various major packages, including the optical fibre backbone, network management systems and a satellite network, and will charge more than Rs 13,000 crore.

The 60,000-km optic fibre network will be at the heart of the defence ministry's future telecom backbone. The project had been set aside for various months and the telecom department (DoT) had recently backed BSNL to speed up the mounting of optic fibre network on a war-footing. The defence ministry has consented to vacate 150 units of spectrum for commercial use by telecom service providers after BSNL commissions alternate telecom network by July 2015, as under an existing pact airwaves in the 1700-to-2000 MHz band would be uniformly shared between DoT and the armed forces. The award of OFC contracts is regarded as the first major progress in BSNL's execution of the alternate telecom network, internally known as the NFS .