Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited commonly known as BSNL held up a meeting to discuss and allow multinational vendors mainly Nokia, Ericsson, and also Samsung to upgrade their 49,300 2G and 3G sites to their fourth generation or advance them with the 4G technology in a bid to expand the rollout with allowing them commercial to the next-generation services.
A discussion held last week with the Empowered Technology Group (ETG) led to the removal of condition that includes mandating these indigenous firms to deploy their locally made core network as further BSNL shared all these with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). If permitted by the department, the tender would further be split into two parts allowing these multinational vendors to roll out of 4G.
Using 4g technology
The telco also advocated for being away with the restrictive clauses for using their 4G core technology from allocated their local vendors and also mandate to these multinational gear vendors for providing them a source code that would involve much confidential techno-commercial information for providing a piece of radio equipment such as RAN, and also the extension of trials to 12-months as among the other suggestions, people are familiar with this matter.
With the other of their four operating zones, the telco was even got into mulling to restrict their home-grown vendors to the east zone just for their field trials and also required to take a much shorter route to their 4G technology by signing up into their multinational vendors and also to save their capital expenditure (Capex).
Employee group in a letter on March 19 to the Prime Minister Office (PMO)
The new tender for their 4G equipment would be dealt with separately without clubbing them with up-gradation. As and when this indigenous core would get ready, the equipment would be shifted towards it, and hence fully complying with their government policy.
BSNL has also been attracting their consumer’s ire for moving at snail pace to deploy up their commercial 4G network, and also losing their subscribers to their private players, and now wanted to accelerate their network for up-gradation by favouring as the proven or been tested with 4G technology supplied from all the likes of Nokia, Ericsson and also Samsung.
US-based Mavenir to provide for 4g
Earlier to this meeting, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had also recommended for the usage of the Indian 4g network and with all the other radioelements that made and even procured locally for deploying the state-run of telco’s data network. C-DoT, PertSol, and also the US-based Mavenir have also claimed that they can get to provide 4G for the BSNL’s upcoming 4G core network plan. However, BSNL has also expressed apprehensions due to their maturity for the local 4G core technology and also the Mavenir’s international roots.
Last year in May, the government have even launched their ambitious Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) campaign as well with the motive to reduce the dependency on imports with the following the disruption of the global supply chains due to the pandemic hit that induced the shutdowns, and even encouraged their domestic companies to come out to the forefront.
