Nokia Siemens bags 300 cr contract from Aircel

New Delhi, May 30: Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) today announced it has won a Rs 300 crore contract from Aircel, a subsidiary of Malaysia's Maxis Group, to build and operate a greenfield GSM network in Kolkata.

The two-year contract includes supply of GSM/EDGE equipment, implementation, project management and managed services, such as operating and maintaining the network infrastructure.

This partnership with NSN will provide Aircel the latest GSM technologies such as the multi-radio flexi base station platform to provide better services making its network ready for 3G and WiMAX services as and when the regulation permits, said Aircel CEO (North and East) Rohit Chandra.

NSN will deploy latest equipment like mini-ultra base stations, 3GPP-based mobile softswitching solution including MSC Servers and Media Gateways PDH, SDH.

Mr Sandip Das, CEO, Maxis and Aircel Director, said, ''Today's announcement is a critical juncture in our network rollout strategy, as Nokia Siemens Networks have joined the consortium of our prime network partners. The Kolkata rollout completes our East/North-East geographic footprint, besides lending us its strategic commercial importance in the region.'' The network will be supported by the multi-technology, multi-vendor NetAct network and service management system, and will be ready for commercial operations by December.

Aircel is India's fifth largest GSM mobile service provider with a subscriber base of over 6.2 million. Currently, Aircel is present in nine telecom circles of Asom, Bihar, Chennai, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, North East, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.

With licences secured for the remaining 14 of the 23 telecom circles, Aircel has also obtained the nod from Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to provide ILD and NLD telephony services.

UNI