• Source:JND
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited's (BSNL) 4G network from Odisha's Jharsuguda. The homegrown 4G stack is a landmark event for India's telecom industry, which coincided with BSNL's silver jubilee celebrations.

Along with the BSNL 4G launch, the prime minister also inaugurated 97,500 mobile towers built by BSNL. Out of these, 92,700 have new 4G setup.

BSNL's 4G launch is delayed by over 8-9 years as the private telecom competitors like Jio, Airtel, etc have started providing 5G services already. Given that, it's crucial to understand why BSNL's 4G stack matters for the telecom industry.

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Why BSNL 4G stack matters? 

Swadeshi: The 4G service is built on a fully homegrown telecom stack, which means that all the components involved, including hardware, software and core technology, are developed by Indian companies like Tejas Network, TCS and C-DOT.

This has placed India in the fifth position in the list of countries that are capable of building a complete telecom network. Prior to India, only China, Denmark, Sweden and South Korea have developed the capability.

Cloud-based stack: The new 4G stack is cloud-based, which makes operations cheaper. Apart from that, the latest development is regarding 4G, but the stack is easy to upgrade to 5G and later even 6G.

The cloud-based stack means that BSNL will have more scalability and will easily expand to pan-India for better connectivity, coverage, faster speeds, and a government-backed service for public benefit. Moreover, it will also help in reducing costs because based on demand, the power of the network could be adjusted.

Planned pan-India connectivity: Union Telecom Minister JyotiradityaScindia confirmed that BSNL has already deployed 98,000 towers and is planning for 1,00,000 more.

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The expansion will now be easier as cloud stack runs mainly on software and requires less hardware to provide services at a new location.

Competitive telecom sector: Until now, BSNL consumers were suffering from the slow 3G services and they had to opt for private operators. In the long run, this has caused a monopoly or duopoly.

With a homegrown 4G stack, BSNL has entered the market with a quick, scalable capability to upgrade to 5G and 6G thereby keeping options available and also private competitors in check.