Chennai: Motorola has announced the deployment of its GSM communications network for Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL), covering 417 towns, cities, villages in the four southern states of India.

The network has a capacity of up to 1.4 million subscribers and is the country’s single largest GSM wireless network deployment for a region.

Says Motorola India country head Pramod Saxena: “South India is one of the country’s fastest growing cellular regions and our network not only has the largest footprint, but also is scalable to serve the growing number of subscribers.”

Motorola won the $170-million contract from BSNL in the last quarter of 2001. The turnkey network deployment includes civil works and infrastructure-base stations, switches, intelligent network, billing platform, turnkey services and project management, terminal devices and subscriber identity module (SIM) cards.