India's Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) will be leveraging UTStarcom for the deployment of 1.3 million lines of UTStarcom's iAN8K B1000 IP DSLAM solution in approximately 900 cities throughout India. This announcement comes after UTStarcom announced a three-year contract to deploy its RollingStream end-to-end IPTV solution with Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL) in India. (See UTStarcom Scores IPTV Deal with India's MTNL)

India is expected to see large increases in broadband uptake and estimates approximately 20 million subscribers by 2010. "Through this network, we aim to deliver real-time applications, high-speed Internet and effectively handle ever-increasing traffic of broadband subscribers," said Mr AK Sinha, chairman and managing director at BSNL.

BSNL boasts one of the largest copper networks in the world, owning approximately 85 percent of India's copper wire local loop networks.

Vijay Yadav, managing director of South Asia operations at UTStarcom said, "With the deployment of UTStarcom's broadband solutions, we anticipate to be able to satisfy one of India's national priorities -- building a broadband economy."

UTStarcom will be the turnkey provider for this deployment, with full responsibility for the network design and planning, deployment, and service roll out and maintenance of the network. UTStarcom's ADSL-based broadband solutions will enable BSNL to offer new broadband-based, triple-play services including video-on-demand, video multicast, VPN services, and high-speed Internet services across the country.

Additionally, UTStarcom will also plans to deploy its NetRing 10000 optical transport solution for the aggregation of DSL traffic in BSNL's network.