State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) will start rolling out 4G services commercially from December onwards, with a target of pan-India rollout by June 2024, the company’s chairman and managing director PK Purwar told FE in an interaction on Saturday.
The company will first deploy the services in Punjab, followed by Haryana, Uttarakhand, and other circles. After testing the 4G services on 200 tower sites, BSNL will complete installing another 3,000 4G sites by November, and will continue to increase the number, Purwar said on the sidelines of the India Mobile Congress.
“June 2024 is the time by which 100,000 towers will start radiating 4G for BSNL. We are targeting a full service launch by that time,” Purwar said.
“In the beta stage of 4G, as on date, nearly 35,000-40,000 customers are using BSNL 4G services on the indigenous stack,” Purwar added.
Comments from Purwar assume significance as in the absence of 4G services, the company has been losing its subscriber base for nearly two years now. In the last 19 months ended July, BSNL lost nearly 16.2 million subscribers, taking its subscriber base to 98 million.
“Until and unless, BSNL’s technology upgradation does not get completed, we will have a customer retention challenge. So, the moment 4G services are available, we will start seeing customer retention,” Purwar added.
The company expects that by March and April next year, a significant presence of BSNL 4G network will be there and that will help it to arrest subscriber churn.
“It is a fact that BSNL’s number of customers, reduced a little bit but the company is able to maintain more than Rs 7000 crore revenue from the mobile segment,” Purwar said. “Secondly, the enterprise segment is growing more than 15% on a year-on-year basis, and we continue to maintain that kind of growth,” Purwar added.
In the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) segment, BSNL has been adding 100,000 customers a month and has more than 3.4 million subscribers, according to Purwar. He added that the company saw an increase in revenue in the last two years and this financial year (FY24) as well, it is expected to increase. The government expects the company to turn net profitable by 2026-27.
The government has in total spent over Rs 3.2 trillion in the last four years to revive the loss-making telecom operator. In June, BSNL got a fresh budgetary support of Rs 89,000 crore in the form of spectrum allotment to provide 4G and 5G services pan-India. The company has given an order worth Rs 19,000 crore to TCS-consortium and ITI for deploying 100,000 4G tower sites.