Good news here, financial tender bids were closed on June 12th and results expected "in a few weeks" so anytime July/August.
This is backed up by Leadcom trading update of "imminent" contracts and news from India contracts "as soon as known".
Should not be so long to wait now :)
And the last paragraph shows the potentail for work and contracts in India over the just the coming 4 years. 45million lines is 4.8 billion $, and they want to put in another 300million lines by 2010, thats 32 billion $ worth of contract awards, perhaps one of the reasons why Nokia and Siemens joined hands.
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1035088
Five submit bids for BSNL tender
Nivedita Mookerji
Monday, June 12, 2006 21:50 IST
NEW DELHI: After deferring the deadline of its mega GSM tender several times, telecom PSU Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) finally closed the process of accepting technical and commercial bids here on Monday.
Although 18 companies had shown interest in the project and had bought the documents, only five have submitted bids for BSNL's $4.8-billion tender to add 45.5-million GSM lines.
Motorola, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson and ZTE have submitted their bids, but only two will qualify.
The tender document states that 60% of the contract would go to the lowest bidder and the remaining 40% to the second-lowest.
In all, BSNL is planning to add 60-million GSM lines, out of which 15 million have already been awarded to the ITI-Alcatel joint venture.
Huawei was at the centre of controversy recently when the Chinese vendor along with HFCL had failed to supply equipment to BSNL on time for its CDMA project.
There was a talk of blacklisting Huawei too, but subsequently the government decided against it. Meanwhile, Huawei's application to set up a manufacturing base in india has been pending with the government for over a year now.
One of the clauses in the tender specifies that at least a third of the equipment bid for in the tender must be manufactured in India. This is being seen as communications minister Dayanidhi Maran's objective to develop India as a manufacturing hub in IT and telecom.
Only last week, US-headquartered Motorola announced plans to set up a manufacturing plant near Chennai. Nokia also has a manufacturing set-up near Chennai.
Among other bidders, Ericsson has a manufacturing facility in India, while Siemens and ZTE have announced their plans too.
The technical bids for the BSNL tender have already been opened, but the process of selection based on financial bids will take a few weeks, a BSNL official said. The tender is expected to cater to both 2G and 3G services of BSNL.
At the end of May, India joined the M-5 club when it crossed the 100-million mobile subscriber base.
Other countries with over 100 million subscriber base are China, the US, Japan and Russia.
The total telecom subscriber base in the country is around 145 million now.
Communications minister Dayanidhi Maran set a target of 250 million phone users by the end of 2007 and 500 million by 2010.