Alcatel-Lucent on Wednesday said they are in talks with various service providers, including Reliance Industries and Tikona Digital Networks for deploying infrastructure for mobile broadband services.

RIL, Tikona and others emerged winners in the recent auction to bag spectrum for Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) services and the government has already alloted radio frequency to these players.

"BWA market opportunity is immense. I believe these networks will start going up by the end of the year or first or second quarter next year. Based on that you have sizeable opportunity," Munish Seth, newly appointed country head for Alcatel-Lucent's Indian operations, said.

"We are at various stages of discussion with them and by early next year we expect to have orders.. like RIL, Tikona Digital Networks for the BWA orders," he told reporters here.

Munish takes over from Vivek Mohan, who now heads Alcatel-Lucent’s global services business. 

"LTE will be most cost effective technology for the operators, " said Rajeev Singh Molares Alcatel-Lucent president of the Asia-pacific region. 

When asked about the issue of the telecom equipment Molares added, "The government has taken the issue seriously and we are in contact with them to resolve this issue."

Last month, India tightened the rules for telecom gear imports and asked vendors including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei and ZTE, to allow inspection of their equipment and submit source codes.

source: PTI