BSNL Starts 4G Journey in Kolkata & West Bengal

After a long wait, state owned telecom service provider BSNL starts their 4G-LTE services in Bengal starting from Kolkata on 15th May, 2024.

First 4G BTS is launched in Ballygunge exchange. Mass scale 4G launch in Kolkata telecom circle would take another month, while BSNL would take 4G to atleast 50 cities of Bengal circle in next 2 months. PSU telco expects to provide full 4G coverage across the state within a year. 

Eastern circles got BSNL 4G quite late while south, central, north and west zones already got 4G. However till date no zone has patch-less, smooth 4G coverage from BSNL. BSNL has invested Rs 1079 crore in Kolkata & Bengal circle to roll out 4G. 

BSNL 4G will use spectrum across 700, 2100 and 2500 MHz band. Presently Jio, Airtel and Vodafone's 4G uses 800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2300 and 2500 MHz band. Apart from BSNL's 4G-LTE on 700 MHz, all other bands are compatible with existing smartphones. I guess that could be done easily by an OTA update to smartphones. 

Presently BSNL has 1720 telecom towers across Kolkata & Bengal circles. All towers will be upgraded with 4G equipment. BSNL has plans to launch another 230 towers in coming days. 

BSNL's 4G equipment and software are coming from all indigenous companies - Tata backed TCS, Tejas Network and C-DoT. These equipment are 5G ready i.e. BSNL can launch 5G seamlessly after some time. India-grown these 4G and 5G ready gears are perfect example of self-reliant India. The deal could be roughly Rs 19,000-crore worth. 

Tata group's IT services arm, TCS is doing the system integration, Tejas is supplying 4G/5G equipment while Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) is supplying its network core solutions. 

Note that Anand Athreya lead (as the CEO & MD) Tejas Network is majority owned by Panatone Finvest, a subsidiary of Tata Sons.  Tejas initially won a Rs 696 crore pan-India deal from BSNL in April 2023 for the supply, installation and commissioning of more than 13,000 TJ1400 access and aggregation routers to upgrade BSNL’s IP-MPLS-driven MAAN network within 18 months. Tejas has also completed the supply of “large quantities” of IP/MPLS routers for BSNL's MAAN network, which is actually the backhaul for highspeed 4G/5G mobile network. In August 2023 BSNL gave the contract to supply 4G/5G RAN equipment to Tejas. The deal was worth Rs 7,492 crore (about $900 million). 

It should be noted that Mukesh Ambani backed digital service provider, Jio Platforms Ltd also created their own 5G stack for their nationwide 5G roll out and in the early June 2024 Jio's tech arm Radisys announced to export this indigenous 5G technology to west African country Ghana's operator NGIC. 

Checked til 10th June, 2024, I am yet to see BSNL 4G signals are up in my locality.