Brazil's Telesp Celular opens digital line tender
SAO PAULO, March 5 (Reuters) - The cellular phone spin-off of Brazil's federally-owned Telesp (TLS_p.SA) on Thursday began
taking bids from companies vying to install one million new digital lines in Sao Paulo, officials said.
A spokesman for newly formed Telesp Celular SA said the tender was open and competing bidders have until March 12 to turn in
their proposals.
The winner of the contract to install the lines will be announced 60 days later, he said.
Created last month out of Telesp's cellular services, Telesp Celular operates more than 1.1 million analog cellular terminals in Sao
Paulo and plans to add another 150,000 analog lines by mid-1988.
The splitting of cellular services from Telesp and other operating units of the federal Telebras (TEL_p.SA) system is part of the
government's plan for privatizing Brazil's telecom sector, the largest in Latin America.
Pent-up demand for cellphones in Sao Paulo is huge, with some 2.6 million on Telesp's waiting list that could take years to whittle
down, officials said.
A Telesp Celular official last week said that the company hopes to have 200,000 of the new digital terminals installed between
October and December, with the remaining 800,000 installed in 1999.
But the spokesman said Thursday that Telesp Celular had not decided yet when new digital line installations would begin.
''We had first scheduled the installation for June or July 1998, but the bidding process was suspended when Ericsson filed a lawsuit
against Telesp'', the spokesman said.
Ericsson Telecomunicacoes SA (ERI_p.SA), a unit of Sweden's Telefon AB LM Ericsson (Nasdaq:ERICY - news; LMEb.ST),
filed a lawsuit in November alleging that Telesp's bid specifications favored other competitors.
Telesp halted the bidding process, altered the bid specifications and published them again, delaying the process, he said. |
