Tender for telecoms upgrade near
The Ministry of Administrative Reform and E-Governance is adding the final touches to its latest tender for an upgrade of the public sector’s telecommunications infrastructure.
The project, dubbed “Syzefxis II” and budgeted at 600-650 million euros, is expected to attract bids from both local and foreign players.
Besides big telecommunication service suppliers, the tender has reportedly already piqued the interest of major networking equipment manufacturers – Cisco being one – as well as construction firms, as the overall project will also require a considerable amount of construction work.
The project has been broken up into five sub-projects. The tender for Syzefxis I, which covers the first two sub-projects (for the supply of telecommunication services), took place in June. It drew interest from all the telecommunication firms in Greece, these being OTE, Vodafone, Wind, HOL, Forthnet, and Cyta.
The tender for the follow-up, Syzefxis II – to cover the project’s three other sub-projects – is expected to be launched during the final 10 days of September. Besides providing more broadband (and if possible optical) access, another main objective of Syzefxis II will be to cut telecommunication costs in the public sector, currently estimated at about 250 million euros annually.
