BSNL to roll out 3G services by end of this financial year

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Kolkata, Sept 7: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), the country’s largest telecom operator, is set to add more than 16 million lines of GSM mobile capacity in the next four months. It’s now the time for the public sector company to start rolling out the third generation (3G) network.

While communication and IT minister Dayanidhi Maran feels the need of 3G to handle high-speed data to promote e-governance, BSNL CMD AK Sinha is busy in preparing the tender document for BSNL’s 3G network.

Mr Sinha told reporters here that a tender to implement 3G network capacity will be out in the next three to four weeks. The tender will comprise 40-60 million lines, of which around 30% lines will be dedicated for 3G service. “The 3G network will help us to offer high-speed data service to our customers. We hope that by March, next year, we will be able to roll out the service,” said Mr Sinha.

Both Mr Sinha and Mr Maran were in the city to participate in a national e-governance conference.

According to one of the BSNL officials, depending on the government’s decision on spectrum allocation and market study on the demand of 3G services among the customers, BSNL will decide the technical aspects of the network which will go with the tender.

The total tender value could surpass Rs 20,000 crore if one goes by the estimated cost of Rs 4,000 per line in rolling out a 3G network.

The move towards 3G, according to BSNL officials, is a logical step as the company is already planning to launch EDGE (Enhanced Data For GSM Evolution) which will provide much more bandwidth to a mobile subscriber compared with the present 2G mobile service.

Though BSNL is behind other service providers like Airtel in launching EDGE, the officials of BSNL feel that at least the company would not be behind its competitors to launch 3G service.

A BSNL subscriber using EDGE would be able to use multimedia applications like seeing movie clippings or sending large data files.