Equipment supply delays BSNL's NIB-II rollout

State-owned telecom major Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) has blamed its vendors from a Telecommunications Consultants India (TCIL)-led consortium for the delay in rolling out of the National Internet Backbone (NIB-II), which was to put India on a par with advanced nations.

Supply delays by the consortium has led to an eight-month setback to the project.

The delay in the rollout plan will impact the broadband plans of the public sector telecom major. The company had planned to roll out its broadband network across 200 cities to cover 6 lakh subscribers.

It also planned to deploy multi-gigabyte, multi-protocol IP infrastructure to provide voice, data and video through this backbone.

BSNL has shot off a series of letters to the vendors, stating that the progress of the project was "not satisfactory" and asked the vendors to speed up the process and avoid further delays.

The target dates for launching of many services such as internet leased line, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), virtual private network, pre-paid (dial-up), among others, have not been met, according to sources.

IT major IBM, security solutions provider Symantec and software applications and infrastructure major OpenWave are the consortium partners of TCIL for the Rs 120-crore NIB-II project.

IBM was to provide storage devices and enterprise management system module (like risk manager, Tivoli service level advisor, Tivoli enterprise dataware house, Tivoli business system manager among others), Symantec anti-abuse and security systems, while TCIL has to provide validation and deployment.

A highly-placed official of TCIL admitted that there was delay in equipment supply.

"Almost 80 per cent of the work has been completed, however, there remains implementation and validation of equipment, which we intend to complete at the earliest on delivery of the equipment."

IBM, on its part, denied any delay from its side. A spokesperson of the company said, "As one of the technology suppliers to TCIL on this project, we have fulfilled our contractual commitments to date."

BSNL, which has written letters asking the consortium headed by TCIL to expedite the process.