Digital Exchange Lines Cost To Be Reworked

The department of telecommunications (DoT) has set up a price negotiation committee to rework the costs of last years 1.3-million digital exchange lines (DELs) tender.

This follows the rejection of the DoT counter-offer by switch (or exchange) vendors a few months back.

The PNC will look at the input costs of the equipment once again, a DoT official said here yesterday. An earlier PNC had made a Rs 5,142 per line counter offer. The counter-offer had a 22 per cent increase over the price at which a previous 1.7 million DELs tender was settled in 1994.

The committee will work out a new price in a few weeks time, the official said. The requirements of DoT will not be affected since it had already placed orders for some six lakh DELs on Indian Telephone Industries (ITI), Bangalore and Hindustan Teleprinters Ltd (HTL), Madras. ITI has a manufacturing agreement with Alcatel of France to make the OCB-230 model exchange, while HTL supplies the EWSD switch of Siemens.

 

The switch vendors had quoted between Rs 7,300 and Rs 7,850 a line in the tender which opened March last. Such a narrow band of quotes by eight vendors had led to DoT officials alleging cartelisation among the vendors.

Alcatel had finished first with a per line quote of Rs 7,298.50, Siemens was second and Ericsson third. Other companies included Fujitsu, NEC, ITI, HTL and AT&T. The companies claimed the price increase over the previous tender was because of additional features required in the new tender and the unsustainable low prices in the 1994 tender.