Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) Ltd will start offering 4G services to their customers in the period of 2017-18. The 4G services from the state-run telecom operator was a long rumored one from the last four years.
There’s no precise roll-out period mentioned by the Chairman of the company, however, according to Economic Times, the 4G services in BSNL will roll out from April. That said, we might see the BSNL 4G services in the next six months.
To recall, BSNL received the 4G spectrum back in 2010, but the company is yet to launch the services, whereas other telecom operators such as Airtel and Reliance Jio already have 4G services and they received the 4G spectrum at the same time with BSNL. So, it’s pretty much clear that BSNL is way behind the competition in terms of providing new services to the customers.
As of now, there’s no information regarding the BSNL’s 4G business. Back in 2016, BSNL sold out their 4G spectrum in six different states of India including Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Kolkata, and Tamil Nadu due to incurring the losses.
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Also, it was earlier reported that BSNL doesn’t want to get the 4G base stations. Instead the operator will hand over the spectrum to independent parties of a state and they will manage the 4G services for BSNL with existing material itself.
Regarding this, Anupam Shrivastava said: “We are in the process of issuing an expression of interest for rolling out 4G services on revenue sharing basis and will provide the only bandwidth to technology service provider who will manage and operate 4G services,”.
All in all, BSNL is certainly behind the competition as they are miles ahead with their 4G offerings and the state-run telecom operator needs to address this quickly to bail themselves out.
