Motorola deploys India's single largest GSM cellular project

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 25 October 2002, 19:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: Motorola Inc Friday announced the deployment of its GSM communications network for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) in South India. The network has a capacity of up to 1.4 million subscribers and is India's single largest GSM wireless network deployment for a region. The Motorola network covers 417 towns, cities, villages and all major state and national highways across the four States of Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. "Motorola has over the years played an instrumental role in supporting India's telecom revolution. We have ensured that the network includes the latest GSM technology features and we are confident that BSNL's network today is comparable to the most advanced systems internationally," said Pramod Saxena, country head, Motorola India. He added, "South India is one of the country's fastest growing cellular regions and our network not only has the largest footprint but also is scalable to serve the growing number of subscribers." Motorola won the US$ 170 million contract from BSNL in the last quarter of 2001 for deploying India's single largest cellular project in terms of number of lines and contract value for a region. The turnkey network deployment includes civil works and infrastructure -- base stations, switches, intelligent network,billing platform, turnkey services and project management, terminal devices and subscriber identity module (SIM) cards. The network is based on the latest GSM technologies introduced by Motorola internationally. Its open standards provide interoperability with alternate vendor solutions. Key network features include unified messaging (UMS), and wireless application protocol (WAP) with base stations that are upgradeable to General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), frequency hopping and congestion relief. Motorola deployed the first Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) network in Madhya Pradesh in 1998 and the first GPRS network in Mumbai in 2001.