Bharti Airtel has awarded Swedish telecom vendor Ericsson Rs 4500 crore contract extending over three years.
NEW DELHI: Extending its earlier contract for managed services, Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced a $1-billion network expansion deal with Ericsson. The fresh deal is for three years.
Ericsson would be involved in design, planning, supply and installation of Airtel networks across towns and cities in 15 telecom circles. The circles are Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh (East), Uttar Pradesh (West), Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chennai, Karnataka, Kerala, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and the North-East.
Bharti Airtel president Manoj Kohli said said in a statement that the partnership with Ericsson “allows us to focus on delivering better customer experience even as we leverage the world class expertise of our partners to roll out our networks across all census towns by March 2007.”
Bharti had signed a $400-million managed service pact with Ericsson in 2004, and followed it up with a $250-million contract for expansion into new towns.
In a recent interview to DNA Money, Bharti chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal had said, “our target is that by coming March, we will be in every town which has more than 5,000 people.” Bharti also aims to be present in 2 lakh villages in terms of coverage by March 2007.
Bharti’s expansion plan appears to be in sync with communications minister Dayanidhi Maran’s target of 250 million telecom subscribers by the end of 2007, of which 200 million are likely to be mobile users. Currently, there are 158.59 million phone users in the country, of which 111.23 million are mobile subscribers.
According to Ericsson India managing director Mats Granryd, “our partnership with Bharti Airtel resulted in the first managed services contract in the industry. Speed of roll-outs plays an extremely important role in large expansions of this nature.” He added, “we are honoured and pleased that Bharti Airtel has chosen to partner with us to expand their footprint across India.”
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