PRESS: Huawei said among bidders to supply storage equipment to MTS

MOSCOW, May 6 (PRIME) -- Major Russian mobile operator MTS may spend half of the 50 billion rubles it had allocated for fulfilment of the data retention law by ordering equipment from Chinese company Huawei for itself and its fixed-line unit MGTS, business daily Kommersant reported on Monday, quoting sources.

Huawei is being considered as a supplier of devices to store data under a solution designed by local Norsi-Trans, which was earlier chosen as a unique supplier of solutions for the data retention law for MTS and MGTS.

U.S. company Western Digital and Yakhont-UVM on local platform Elbrus manufactured by Norsi-Trans were also considered.

MTS plans to purchase 50 billion rubles of equipment from Norsi-Trans. One of the sources said half of the sum could be spent on equipment to store data. Norsi-Trans said it can use only Huawei’s servers and data storage systems.

Under the data retention law, operators must keep from July 1, 2018, phone talks, text messages, images and sounds exchanged by users. Exploitation of foreign equipment may be banned, but it does not apply to hard disk drives for data storage systems.

(64.6314 rubles – U.S. $1)

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