While state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL)is still debating on the size of the GSM contract, market leader Bharti Airtel has gone ahead and signed a $ 2 billion (Rs 8,000 crore)equipment deal with Sweden's Ericsson. Under one of the largest such deals ever, Ericsson will design, plan, deploy, optimise and manage Bharti's GSM network across 15 circles. As part of the two year supply and services contract it will also deliver a pan-Indian integrated device management solution for Bharti.
Bharti is not the only private operator that is committing huge capex for expanding its network. Reliance Communications Ltd., India's second-biggest mobile services provider last week awarded two network expansion contracts worth more than $600 million to Alcatel-Lucent and China's Huawei Technologies. Bharti itself had recently signed a $900 million deal with Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN).
So whether BSNL and communications minister A Raja like it or not, the private operators are going all out to capture a large slice of India's unconnected masses. Unless BSNL gets its act into place quickly, it will realise that most of these people in rural India have already made up their mind about a mobile connection well before it reaches there. That could be a sad story for a corporation that focussed initially on small-town India while private operators were looking only at urban India. Bharti currently has 42.68 million customers of which 40.74 million are mobile customers.
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