Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Huawei grapple to provide broadband gear to RIL

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) is on the verge of finalising a vendor to supply broadband gear. It will roll out wireless broadband services in the next six to nine months. Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and Ericsson compete to bag this project. RIL owns 95 per cent of stake in Infotel Broadband which recently won license for broadband wireless spectrum in all the 22 circles, for Rs 4,800 crore. At present RIL is testing broadband equipment of these three vendors.

The project's capital expenditure is around $1 billion, 70 per cent of the expenditure would be utilised for building and maintaing infrastructure and the remaining 30 per cent is for equipment, the order size could be about $300 million. In November, RIL and Ericsson announced the result of their first field trial of LTE-TDD (time division duplex) mobile system technology, which showed peak rates of 80 Mbps (megabyte per second) in the downlink and 20 Mbps in the uplink.