The name Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited derives from Hindi, which means India Communications Corporation Limited in English.
History
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited is an Indian government enterprise and its history can be traced back to British India. The foundation of the telecommunications network in India was laid by the British sometime during the 19th century. During the British era, the first telegraph line was established between Calcutta and Diamond Harbour in 1850. The British East India Company started using the telegraph in 1851 and until 1854 telegraph lines were laid across the country. In 1854, the telegraph service was opened to the public and the first telegram was sent from Mumbai to Pune. In 1885, the Indian Telegraph Act was passed by the British Imperial Legislative Council. After the bifurcation of the Post and Telegraph department in the 1980s, the creation of Department of Telecom eventually led to the emergence of the government owned telegraph and telephone enterprise which led to the foundation of BSNL.[9]
For 160 years, BSNL had operated the public telegram service. In 2010 the telex network between its 182 offices was replaced with the "Web Based Telegram Messaging System" which relied on internet connections rather than telex lines (which are more reliable where power outages are more common). This led to a decline in service, and the company applied the title "diminished service" to telegrams in 2010. Finally on 15 July 2013 the public telegram service was shut down completely.[10][11]
BSNL Mobile is a major provider of GSM network services under the brand names CellOne and BSNL all over India. It has wide network coverage in both urban and rural areas of India. It has over 121.82 million customers across India.[6]
BSNL Mobile offers prepaid, postpaid services and value-added services such as Free Phone Service (FPH), India Telephone Card (Prepaid card), Account Card Calling (ACC), Virtual Private Network (VPN), Tele-voting, Premium Rate Service (PRM). It also offers the IPTV which enables customers to watch television through the Internet and Voice and Video Over Internet Protocol (VVoIP).[12]
BSNL Landline
BSNL Landline was launched in the early 1990s. It was the only fixed-line telephone service for the whole country before the New Telecom Policy was announced by the Department of Telecom in 1999. Only the Government-owned BSNL and MTNL were allowed to provide land-line phone services through copper wire in the country. BSNL Landline is the largest fixed-line telephony in India. It has over 9.55 million customers and 47.20% market share in the country as of 28 February 2021.[6]
Internet
BSNL is the fourth largest ISP in India, having presence throughout the country. It also has the largest fibre-based telecom network in the country, around 7.5 lakh kilometers, among the four operators in the country.[13]
BSNL Broadband provides telecom services to enterprise customers including MPLS, P2P and Internet leased lines. It provides fixed-line services and landline using CDMA technology and its own extensive optical fiber network. BSNL provides Internet access services through dial-up connections as prepaid, NetOne as postpaid, and DataOne as BSNL Broadband.[14][15]
With effect to the government of India's policy decision to provide state-owned BSNL with another revival package worth 1.64 lakh crore rupees, the struggling PSU was merged with Government's special purpose vehicle BBNL. This gave the struggling PSU a boost and an additional advantage of additional 5.67 lakh kilometres of optical fibre which has been laid across 1.85 lakh village panchayats in the country using the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF). Currently, it has an optical fibre cable network of over 6.83 lakh kilometre.[5]
BSNL 4G
BSNL started 4G service in some parts of India such as Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh in January 2019, but it is limited to a few cities and towns. Most of its 4G services are currently available in Southern India. However, BSNL is trying to launch pan India 4G services up to September 2022.[19][20] The telecom minister said that BSNL will launch its 4G services all over India on the 75th Independence day of India along with various other projects.[21]
BSNL 5G
On behalf of the government of India, the Minister of Communications Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that the State-Owned Telco would start its 5G operations by 15 August 2023. He also added that the 4G and 5G network of the state-owned BSNL would be a completely home-grown indigenous 4G and 5G network technology; thus, emphasising more on Govt. of India's Atmanirbhar Bharat.[22][23][24][25]
IP services
BSNL Wing Services
On 16 August 2018, BSNL launched "BSNL Wings Services" in 22 telecom circles, in which there is no need for a SIM card or cable wiring as is a VoIP service through an app.[26] It offers unlimited free calling for one year throughout India.[27]
Administrative units
BSNL vertical divisions
BSNL is primarily divided into three vertical divisions:
BSNL - Consumer Fixed Access (CFA), wire line and broadband business.
BSNL - Enterprise Business, Enterprise customers on turnkey basis.
Other than these three vertical divisions, there are electrical wings and civil wings which take care of real estate monetization.
BSNL horizontal divisions
Horizontally, BSNL is divided into a number of administrative units, variously known as telecom circles, metro districts, project circles and specialized units. It has 24 telecom circles, two metro districts, six project circles, four maintenance regions, five telecom factories, three training institutions and four specialized telecom units.[28] Each circle is headed by a Chief General Manager (CGM) who is an officer of Indian Telecom Service (ITS).
The organisational structure of BSNL is as follows: Chief General Manager being the head of the Circle who is the officer of HAG+ level, assisted by three or four Principal General Manager (PGM) who is the officer of grade HAG. The districts over a circle is being headed by the designations as General Manager officer of grade of SAG who looks over around two to four districts, while where the connections are less and the smaller district is being headed by Telecom District Manager (TDM) Officer of the grade of JAG and Telecom Divisional Engineer (TDE) officer of STS grade, all the officers above the post of TDE (including TDE) are of Group A and they are the officers of grade of Indian Telecom Service (ITS) directly or promotive. Then the Group B consists of Additional Divisional Engineer, Sub Divisional Engineer and Junior Telecom officer and then the organisation has Group C and D employees.
Merger and acquisitions
On 24 October 2019, the Government of India announced a revival package for BSNL and MTNL which includes monetising assets, raising funds, TD-LTE spectrum, and a voluntary retirement scheme for employees. Apart from the package, the Ministry of Communications has decided to merge MTNL with BSNL. Pending this, MTNL will be a wholly owned subsidiary of BSNL.[4][29][30][31]
On 24 October 2019, the Government of India announced a revival package for BSNL and has given its agreement to an in-principle merger (operational merger, i.e. only the operations of MTNL and BSNL would be merged and they would be managed by BSNL) for MTNL and BSNL[32]
On 27 July 2022, the Government of India announced another revival package for the state-owned BSNL, for providing 4G and 5G services making the PSU more viable and vibrant and turning it into a profit making organisation; under this policy decision the government also merged BBNL with BSNL.[5]
Controversies
Website hacking
In 2012 Nikhil Thakur, a hacker and Internet activist, broke into the Madhya Pradesh BSNL website and later on hacked the India BSNL website.[33][34]
Cyber attack
In July 2017, BSNL suffered a cyber attack which affected south India, especially Karnataka, when malware affected the telco's broadband network using modems with default passwords.[35] The virus reportedly affected 60,000 modems and blocked their internet connectivity. Later BSNL issued an advisory notice to its broadband customers, urging them to change their default router username and passwords.[36]
₹20,701 crore (US$2.6 billion) (2023)[2]
₹−8,162 crore (US$−1.0 billion) (2023)[2]
