Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is working as BSNL's (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) partner to launch 4G in India. Ashwini Vaishnaw, IT and Telecom minister of India, said in 2023 that BSNL has started rolling out the 4G network with 200 sites, and after a three-month trial period, the state-run telecom operator would start deploying 4G at a large scale. However, that is not the truth, said BSNL's Employee Union (EU). In a letter to Vaishnaw, BSNL EU wrote that TCS has not even completed the 4G field trials yet.
The letter said, "the commissioning of BSNL’s 4G equipments by the TCS is getting unbearably delayed. So far, the TCS has not even completed the field level trials of it’s 4G equipments. No one knows when the field trials would get completed and TCS would start the commissioning of BSNL’s 4G equipments."
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In fact, TCS is expected to only complete the field trials by October 2024. The EU wrote that the CMD PK Purwar said, "the commissioning of BSNL’s 4G equipments by the TCS would be completed by October, 2024. This target date of October, 2024 itself is too long, considering the dire situation in which BSNL has been placed. However, it seems that meeting this target date itself has now become impossible."
The employee union feels that the state-run telecom operator is losing customers because of not being able to compete with the private telcos in the absence of 4G. The deployment of the technology by TCS has already been delayed and because of that, as per TRAI data, BSNL has been losing tens of lakhs of customers every month.
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"It is needless for us to state that BSNL is facing such a dire situation only because of its inabilty to provide high speed data service to its customers. While Reliance Jio and Airtel have already rolled out their 5G service throughout the country, BSNL is struggling to complete with them with 2G & 3G technologies. The launching of BSNL's 4G service is getting terribly delayed and the same is nowhere in sight," said the EU.
