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![]() BSNL Headquarters at New Delhi | |
Company type | Central Public Sector Undertaking |
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Industry | Telecommunications |
Founded | 15 September 2000 |
Headquarters | , |
Area served | India |
Key people |
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Services | |
Revenue | ![]() |
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Total assets | ![]() |
Total equity | ![]() |
Owner | Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications, Government of India |
Number of employees | 56,820 (as on 30 June 2024 as per RTI) |
Divisions |
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Subsidiaries | |
Website | Official Website |
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited(abbreviated as BSNL) (India Communications Corporation Limited) is an Indian central public sector undertaking under the ownership of Department of Telecommunications, which is part of the Ministry of Communications, Government of India with its headquarters in New Delhi, India. The central public sector undertaking was established on 1 October 2000 by the Government of India. Its highest official is designated as Chairperson and Managing Director who is a central civil service group 'A' gazetted officer from Indian Communication Finance Service cadre or central engineering service group 'A' gazetted officer from Indian Telecommunication Service cadre. It provides mobile voice and internet services through its nationwide telecommunications network across India. It is the largest government-owned-wireless telecommunications service provider in India. [6]
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. [7]
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. [8] [9]
BSNL provides both fixed line telephones and mobile telephony services on the GSM platform.
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). [10]
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]
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. [11]
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. [12] [13]
BSNL Bharat Fiber (FTTH) was launched in February 2019. It offers TV over IP (IPTV), Video On-Demand (VoD), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Audio On-Demand (AoD), Bandwidth On-Demand (BoD), remote education, video conferencing services, interactive gaming, and Virtual Private LAN services. BSNL has said that its optic fiber network provides fixed access to deliver high-speed Internet up to 300 Mbit/s. [14] [15] [16]
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 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. [17] [18] 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. [19]
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. [20] [21] [22] [23]
On 28 May 2013, BSNL launched "Internet Data Centre - Managed Cloud Services". This includes computation, software, data access and storage services for individual as well as enterprises. [24]
Services s include:
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. [25] It offers unlimited free calling for one year throughout India. [26]
BSNL is primarily divided into three vertical divisions:
Other than these three vertical divisions, there are electrical wings and civil wings which take care of real estate monetization.
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. [27] 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.
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] [28] [29] [30]
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 [31]
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]
In 2012 Nikhil Thakur, a hacker and Internet activist, broke into the Madhya Pradesh BSNL website and later on hacked the India BSNL website. [32] [33]
In July 2017, BSNL suffered a cyber attack, in Karnataka, when malware affected the telco's broadband network using modems with default passwords. [34] 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. [35]
India's telecommunication network is the second largest in the world by number of telephone users with over 1.1 billion subscribers as of December 2023. It has one of the lowest call tariffs in the world enabled by multiple large-scale telecom operators and the ensuant hyper-competition between them. India has the world's second-largest Internet user-base with over 904 million broadband internet subscribers as of December 2023.
Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited. Headquartered in New Delhi, India. MTNL Provides services in the metro cities of Mumbai and New Delhi in India and in the island nation of Mauritius in Africa. It had a monopoly in Mumbai and New Delhi until 1992, when the telecom sector was opened to other service providers. "एमटीएनएल है, तो सही है" {"MTNL hai to sahi hai"} & "Transparency makes us different" is its motto. As of May 2024, it has 1.92 million subscribers.
A public call office (PCO) is a payphone facility located in a public place in India and Pakistan. It is also another name in the United Kingdom for a public telephone box.
The Department of Telecommunications, abbreviated to DoT, is a department of the Ministry of Communications of the executive branch of the Government of India.
BSNL Broadband is an Indian wireline broadband operator, a division of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited owned by Department of Telecommunications under Ministry of Communications of the Government of India. It provides both wired and wireless broadband services as well as many value-added services. BSNL Broadband launched its services on 14 January 2005 as Data One.
BSNLMobile is an Indian state-owned telecommunication company of the Government of India. BSNL Mobile operates under the BSNL brand and provides wireless cellular services to B2B, B2C, & B2G segments in India. BSNL Mobile has a pan-India presence with presence in all the 22 telecom circles in India.
Internet in India began in 1986 and was initially available only to the educational and research community. General public access to the internet in India began on 15 August 1995. By 2023, India had more than 900 million Internet users. It is reported that in 2022 an average mobile Internet consumption in India was 19.5 GB per month and the mobile data usage per month rose from 4.5 exabytes in 2018 to 14.4 exabytes in 2022.
The Indian Telecommunication Service, widely known as ITS, and earlier known as Telegraph Engineering Service Class I is one of the Central Civil Services under Group 'A' of the executive branch of the Government of India. The appointment to this service is done through Combined Engineering Services Exam held every year by Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) of India. The service was created to meet the techno managerial needs of the government in areas related to telecommunications. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had been managed for years by the officers of this permanent cadre, called the Indian Telecommunications Service (ITS). The officers of ITS work under restrictions and rules of Central Civil Services (Conduct) rules.
Centre for Excellence in Telecom Technology and Management (CETTM) located in Hiranandani Gardens, Powai, Mumbai is the telecom training centre of MTNL, the incumbent operator of Government of India (GOI). It was founded in 2003 as one of the largest telecom training centres in India and amongst the biggest in Asia. The Centre provides extensive training to corporate employees, students, and MTNL's internal employees in telecom switching, transmission, wireless communication, telecom operations and management.
3G mobile telephony was relatively slow to be adopted globally. In some instances, 3G networks do not use the same radio frequencies as 2G so mobile operators must build entirely new networks and license entirely new frequencies, especially so to achieve high data transmission rates. Other delays were due to the expenses of upgrading transmission hardware, especially for UMTS, whose deployment required the replacement of most broadcast towers. Due to these issues and difficulties with deployment, many carriers delayed acquisition of these updated capabilities.
BharatNet, also known as Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL), is a central public sector undertaking, set up by the Department of Telecommunications, a department under the Ministry of Communications of the Government of India for the establishment, management, and operation of the National Optical Fibre Network to provide a minimum of 100 Mbit/s broadband connectivity to all 250,000-gram panchayats in the country, covering nearly 625,000 villages, by improving the middle layer of nation-wide broadband internet in India to achieve the goal of Digital India.
Bohani is a village located in the Gadarwara taluk in Narsinghpur district of the Jabalpur division in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited is an Indian telecommunications company and a subsidiary of Jio Platforms, headquartered in Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra. It operates a national LTE network with coverage across all 22 telecom circles. Jio offers 5G, 4G and 4G+ services all over India. Its 6G service is in the works.
Telephone / Telecom Advisory Committees (TAC) is a high level Indian government body made up of members of parliament and other members nominated by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to address issues concerning telecommunication in India. Looked upon as a privileged panel, the Telephone Advisory Committees, constituted by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (India) of the Government of India to serve as a vital feedback mechanism for improvement of services in the Telecommunications sector by the Department of Telecommunications
Ministry of Communications is a Central ministry under the Government of India responsible for telecommunications and postal service. It was carved out of Ministry of Communications and Information Technology on 19 July 2016.
Telecom Advisory Committee (TAC) is a high level Indian government body made up of members of parliament and other members nominated by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to address issues concerning telecommunication in India. Looked upon as a privileged panel, the Telecom Advisory Committees, constituted by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (India) of the Government of India to serve as a vital feedback mechanism for improvement of services in the Telecommunications sector by the Department of Telecommunications.
Tejas Networks is an optical, broadband and data networking products company based in India. The company designs develops and sells its products to telecom service providers, internet service providers, utilities, security and government entities in 75 countries. The company has built many IPs in multiple areas of telecom networking and has emerged as an exporter to other developing countries including Southeast Asia and Africa.
Patwar is a village and gram panchayat in the Prayagraj district of Uttar Pradesh. It belongs to Prayagraj Division. Prayagraj, Chitrakoot, Rewa, and Varanasi are the closest cities to Patwar. It has an elevation of 145 m.
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