The decision was taken in a meeting held last week under the chairmanship of Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnav to speed up the steps to expand BSNL’s 4G network. The following are the steps.
The network is being developed at a cost of around Rs 13,000 crore with a 10-year annual maintenance contract. For this, the contract is awarded to TCS for a total of Rs 24556.37 crore. TCS Sites will be provided with 4G devices.
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Tata Consultancy Services and government-owned ITI Ltd had submitted the contract to deploy the BSNL 4G network in November last year. The agreement was to deploy 4G in four zones.
Although ITI has 20 percent reservation in network renewal, the proposal is to use the hardware provided by the consortium led by TCS. This will include the core network hardware of the private company Center for Development of Telematics (C-DoT).
There were reports that BSNL may launch first 4G service in Chandigarh. It may take more than a year to get 4G services across India. At the same time, the Department of Telecom is trying to implement the high-speed broadband connection of the state-owned BSNL in all villages. As part of the Bharat Net program, which is trying to build optical fiber network in rural areas, telecom services have been brought to about 1.9 lakh villages in the country. It is indicated that the service will be extended to 2.2 lakh villages by the middle of this year
