Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited

BSNL provides both fixed line telephones and mobile telephony services on GSM platform.

BSNL Mobile is a major provider of GSM network under brand name 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.[7]

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).[11]

BSNL Landline was launched in early 1990s. It was the only fixed-line telephone serving for 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.[7]

BSNL is the fourth largest ISP in India, with 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.[12]

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.[13][14]

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, Virtual Private LAN services. BSNL said that, its huge optic fiber network provides fixed access to deliver high-speed Internet up to 300 Mbps.[15][16][17]

With effect to Govt. 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 kilometre 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.[6]

BSNL started 4G service in some parts of India since January 2019 such as Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, but is limited to a few cities or towns. Most of 4G services are currently available in Southern India. However, BSNL is trying to launch pan India 4G services upto September 2022.[18][19] The telecom minister said that BSNL will launch it's 4G services all over India on 75th Independence day of india along with various other projects.[20]

On behalf of the Govt. of India, the hon'ble Minister of Communications Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that the State-Owned Telco would start its 5G operations by 15th 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. [21] [22] [23] [24]

On 16 August 2018, BSNL has launched "BSNL Wings Services" in 22 telecom circles in which, there is no need of 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 verticals

• BSNL - Consumer Fixed Access (CFA), wire line and broadband business.
• BSNL - Consumer Mobility (CM), wireless business, primarily 3G/4G GSM services, WLL-M services. WLL-M
• BSNL - Enterprise Business, Enterprise customers on turnkey basis.
• Other than these three verticals, 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 being 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.

In July 2017, BSNL had suffered a cyber attack which affected south India, especially Karnataka, when a malware affected the telco's broadband network using modems with default passwords.[32] The virus has 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.[33]