Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), recently started rolling out IFTV (Intranet Fiber TV) services for customers in select parts of the country. It started with Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu and later expanded to other areas such as Punjab, Haryana and Puducherry. Now, recently, BSNL said that it is launching BiTV, which is also intranet TV, but non-fiber based, for mobile customers. Note that both are free for BSNL users. So what's the difference between the two? Let's see.
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BSNL IFTV and BiTV Explained
BSNL's IFTV service is for fiber customers. The service offers over 500 live TV channels and is entirely free for the FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) customers of BSNL. The customer will not have to pay a single rupee for this. It is the same case with BiTV as well.
The BiTV is for the mobile customers of BSNL. It brings over 300 live TV channels for users, including premium channels. This is just launched in Puducherry at the moment and is also free of cost completely. So the underlying technology is the same, just the mechanism of delivery is different. Thus, both are essentially same services from BSNL, but branded differently as one is meant for the mobile customers and one is meant for the fiber customers.
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BSNL has plans to launch BiTV services in more parts of the country in January 2025 including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand. The nationwide availability of the service will take a little time. But it is worth noting that someday, BSNL will move to introduce this service under a commercial plan. It is not going to be free forever. At the moment, customers who are getting to use this is helping BSNL in the testing phase.
