Hfcl Emerges Top Contender

DoT equipment supply tenders

Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd (HFCL) yesterday outbid 40 other contenders to emerge as the lowest financial bidder to supply the department of telecommunications (DoT) with digital loop carrier (DLC) systems for optical fibre cables. These systems will be used in an experiment to bring fibre cables into the subscriber loop, that is, up to 500 metres of a subscribers premises.

So far only copper wires were being used for this. This will not only increase the capacity of the telephone lines hundred fold, but also cut down the cost in bringing separate pairs of wires to customer.

HFCL bid a price of Rs 34.98 crore for the entire 210 systems of DLC equipment, each of which will have 480 voice channels. Its closest rival, Vikas Hybrid Electronics Ltd, bid Rs 37.19 crore. United Telecom of Hyderabad was the highest bidder with Rs 197 crore.

The HFCL bid comes a day after its success on Tuesday, in which it was the lowest bidder for the 2/34 mega bits per second optimux equipment. This will be used by DoT to connect two telephone exchanges.

HFCL bid a price of Rs 1402.54 lakh to provide 1,155 optimux systems. It nearest rival, Shyam Telecom, had bid Rs 1411.43 lakh. There were seven bidders for the optimux systems, including the scam-tainted ARM.

For HFCL, this is the fifth equipment bid in the last two months in which it has emerged the lowest bidder for various DoT tenders.In April, HFCL was the lowest bidder in three tenders. These include, bids for 13 GHz digital microwave radio, 6 MHz digital microwave radio and 11 GHz radio that DoT is to use in its transmission network.