Honestly speaking, for the longest time, just having a BSNL SIM card kinda felt like owning an antique car. It was dependable in a retro kind of way, endearing even, but you wouldn’t exactly bet on it against the Ferraris of the telecom world — Jio and Airtel. But the narrative is shifting. It’s not just patching holes in the hull; it’s ordering a new engine. Its latest move, which definitely smacks less of an ‘incremental update’ and more like a war cry against network issues, takes the form of 23,000 new 4G towers across the country – and for us regular folks, finally getting Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) in our lives.
The Dead Zone Dilemma
We have all been there. You descend to a basement, step into an elevator, or simply set foot in a building with walls slightly thicker than cardboard, and your signal bars disappear like a magician’s rabbit. It’s frustrating. It’s archaic. I tend to agree that, in a world where we are constantly online, the loss of voice connectivity due to nothing more than physical geography feels like a betrayal. That is where the 23,000 new towers come in.
Consider a cellular network as akin to a gigantic sprinkler system. If the heads (towers) are too far apart, you end up with dry patches (dead zones), places where the water (signal) doesn’t reach. With that great hoard of hardware, BSNL is doing nothing more than adding a few more sprinkler heads to keep everything green. It’s a brute-force solution, granted, but with radio waves, sometimes you simply need more metal in the ground.
The Magic of VoWiFi
But the real game-changer here isn’t the steel towers, it’s the software magic known as VoWiFi. If you’re not a tech wizard, here’s what it means. Typically, the voice calls you make go over the cellular frequencies that the towers we were just chatting about transmit. If the tower can’t see your phone, you can’t communicate.
VoWiFi bypasses this entirely. It turns your home or office Wi-Fi router into a tiny cell tower. When you place a call, your voice is turned into data packets — think tiny digital envelopes — and routed over the internet connection you already pay for, rather than through the air to a remote cell tower.
It’s the feeling you get when you realize that you no longer have to drive three miles to the post office just to send somebody a letter, because now there’s a teleportation device right there in your living room. The reception problems typical of thick concrete buildings are no longer an issue. You always have a full signal as long as you’re on WiFi. For BSNL subscribers who have stood by their carrier in a difficult time, this is one feature that brings them into the modern era.
Bridging the Digital Divide
And there is an underbelly to this story that’s deeper than the convenient phone call from your basement. And BSNL has always been the carrier of the hinterlands, serving rural regions that private players frequently overlook because they don’t turn a profit. The deployment of 4G infrastructure to these areas isn’t just about speeding up downloads; it’s also a bid for economic inclusion.
When 4G coverage reaches a village, that village gains access to digital banking, online education, and telemedicine. It’s the difference between traveling three hours to see a doctor and having a video consult. Through this build-out, BSNL is strengthening the country’s digital spine in its most remote and difficult-to-reach areas. It’s not merely a tech upgrade; it’s an active civic duty.
The Road Ahead
So, is it all smooth sailing? Probably not. Projects of this size are messy. Towers are encountering constraints on zoning, power supply, and maintenance. Plus, the race is already moving past 5G toward what’s next, and BSNL would be stuck fixing itself to have a working 4G network even as everyone else in the industry uses that network to build the future. But here’s the thing: for most people, having a really solid, unshakeable 4G (plus WiFi calling) signal is more important than having a heavily hyped but not fully baked 5G signal that eats your phone’s battery in an hour. BSNL now plays by a different set of rules—reliability over hype—and that could prove to be a wise strategy.
