Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) will become the first telecom company in India to come out with homegrown 4G networks. All of the private telecom operators, including Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, either partnered with Chinese vendors such as Huawei or European vendors including Nokia and Ericsson or Samsung from South Korea. India didn’t have a domestic company that could do what all these foreign vendors could do. So the telecom operators had no other option but to go ahead by partnering with the foreign vendors. Developing homegrown 4G would have cost a lot of money to the private telcos, and since they are all about profits, they wouldn’t have waited this long the way BSNL did. But now, BSNL is very close to launching homegrown 4G. But the bigger success here would be that the state-run telco has managed to do something the private operators didn’t. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) have together helped BSNL in developing homegrown 4G. If BSNL’s 4G is successful, it would mean that Indian telcos can look towards C-DoT and TCS to help with future generation networks. C-DoT had already said that BSNL’s 4G network will also be 5G ready and can be tweaked to offer 5G NSA (non-standalone) services.
Indian Telecom Operators Will Have a Local Option for the First Time
If BSNL’s 4G and 5G networks are as efficient and good as what the private telcos built by partnering up with foreign vendors, then the Indian telecom industry will have a local player to rely upon for coming out with future generation connectivity networks. Further, it would also make India’s mobile networks more secure, which is in the interest of the nation. Not only that, but if local companies are growing, it would add to more job generation and boost the economy of the country. But for all this to happen, BSNL’s 4G/5G networks need to be good in performance. The state-run telco is expected to launch 4G services by August 15, 2022.
