BSNL’s 4G rollout to be a boon for rural India
21 Apr 2021
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BSNL’s pan India rollout of 4G services will be a boon for rural India because it will dilute the competition in the telecom industry. Telco already has numerous sites in the rural parts of the country besides several 4G sites in many prominent cities as well as tier-2 and tier-3 cities of the country.
BSNL is expected to follow up by providing efficient network services in rural or remote parts of India.
However, the pan-India rollout of 4G services will require a lot of resources and upgradation of more than 1,00,000 sites which also includes sites of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL).
Private telecom majors Reliance Jio Infocomm and rival Bharti Airtel are also eyeing the vast rural market, while Vodafone Idea is trying to catch up.
Once BSNL completes upgradation of those sites to 4G, it can build an impressive network of 4G all across the country. Because of BSNL’s attractive pricing, several users would be compelled to try out its offerings.
BSNL is eyeing for an hybrid 4G rollout and it has received government nod from the ETG and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for the hybrid plan.
Under the hybrid 4G plan, BSNL plans to divide the tender into two parts, one part comprising 50,000 sites to be offered to Indian vendors and the remaining 57,000 sites to be offered to global telecom vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia, etc.
Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE are expected to be excluded because of the ‘trusted’ list policy that the government has introduced.
BSNL’s 4G rollout comes at a time when private telcos like Reliance Jio are looking at 5G rollout and hence the state-run telco needs to speed up plans. BSNL will also have to ensure high-quality network experience to the users.
