WiMax and WiFi to play key role in BSNL’s 4G Rollout

By Zia Askari

India’s state owned service provider BSNL is moving towards 4G in its own way of having a converged technology approach of having WiMax and WiFi to deliver 4G for its set of customers in India.

Even though it has surrendered six circles where it had Wimax spectrum, it still has 16 circles with Wimax and this is here that the service provider will be launching 4G services riding high on Wimax technology.

“We are not taking the LTE approach now. We already have WiMax spectrum for 16 circles. This is where we will be launching 4G services for our customers. We will have different approach of incorporating a rainbow of technologies including Wifi to enable next generation mobility for our customers,” explained, Anupam Shrivastava, Director, Consumer Mobility, BSNL.

BSNL 4G by March 2015

As far as reaching out to its end customers, BSNL is looking towards WiFi offloading as a way to bridge the connect between Wimax and its legacy telecom infrastructure.

“We are looking at March 2015 to launch our 4G services in the country. WiFi offloading is a great technology that will enable us to deliver 4G services to our customers. We already have Wimax equipment from Huawei and are evaluating WiFi offloading solutions from Cisco and Ahmedabad based Elitecore. All this will be procured keeping in mind the Preferential Market Access policy that we have in place,” he added.

Converged Mobile and Fixed Telephony

This kind of approach towards 4G services can take full advantage of communications technologies such as Wimax and WiFi and as today a lot of Service Providers are looking at ways to converge fixed and mobile telephony into a single communications service, this can pave way for a robust 4G rollout in India.