New Delhi: BSNL’s 4G network is quietly doing a lot more work than most people probably assume. According to numbers shared by C-DoT CEO Rajkumar Upadhyay, the state-run operator is now pushing through about 6 petabytes of data every single day on its homegrown 4G network. That’s a genuinely massive number, and it says something about how far BSNL has come in the last couple of years, especially after all the skepticism around whether India’s own 4G stack could actually hold up at scale.
The setup behind this involves a few different players. C-DoT builds the network core, TCS handles systems integration, and there’s a consortium that includes C-DoT alongside Tejas Networks, which supplies the actual network gear. Put together, this is what people mean when they call it a “homegrown” or full-stack 4G solution, and honestly, not many countries can say they’ve built one from the ground up. India is apparently only the fifth country to pull this off.
On the ground, BSNL now has roughly 1.75 lakh base stations spread across close to 1 lakh sites, and those sites are serving somewhere between 2.2 and 2.3 crore 4G subscribers. That’s a decent chunk of users relying on infrastructure that didn’t even exist in this form all that long ago.
There’s more coming too. Upadhyay mentioned that C-DoT is working on adding HD voice support for BSNL, and while IMS 4G is technically already built, it’ll need some software updates before it’s ready for 5G. So the groundwork is there, it just needs some polishing.
Whether this translates into better subscriber growth and stronger revenue for BSNL down the line is still an open question plenty of users online report mixed speeds depending on location. But the fact that the network is handling this much daily traffic without falling over is a real signal that the technology itself is working the way it was supposed to.
