BSNL eyes SoftBank's satellites to unleash India's biggest telecom disruption yet

NEW DELHI: Softbank has held talks with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) for out leasing broadband bandwidth from OneWeb's low earth orbit (LEO) communication satellites to disrupt the telecom technology landscape in India with low latency Internet and voice services.


BSNL chairman Anupam Shrivastava told ETTelecom that top company executives made a presentation on the company’s preparedness to senior SoftBank executives on how it plans to use the satellite space which offers huge volume of bandwidth with low latency that can be used for consumer as well as enterprise voice and data services.

Airbus, SoftBank, Bill Gates and OneWeb founder Greg Wyler have come together to put up a constellation of low orbit satellites at an altitude ranging between 150 kilometres and 200 kilometres over the earth’s surface to provide mobile broadband services. Softbank owns nearly 40% in OneWeb.

“OneWeb is a newly conceived idea. SoftBank is coming up with 850 LEO satellites to cover every nook and corner of earth with each satellite facing a land mass every time,” Shrivastava said, adding that the telco is in active talks with the group.

Led by Shrivastava, a high-level delegation of state-owned telco met SoftBank CTO and other top executives in Japan last week.

"We don't comment on confidential business meetings," a Softbank spokesperson said.

Shrivastava said OneWeb is a very disruptive technology, but said the company will require due approvals from the regulator and the government, since such means of offering broadband is not yet permitted in India.

“If it succeeds, it has the potential to disrupt all telecom service providers worldwide. This technology will only need a gateway to pump bandwidth and distribute anywhere in the world,” Shrivastava said.

The consortium is expected to complete the ambitious program in three phases over a period of five years, and according to Shrivastava, the new communications technology would be better than the GSM and optical fibre cable platforms.

Shrivastava said that only a customer premise equipment (CPE) would be required cutting the need to have mobile telephony towers and optical fibre cables, and it can enable seamless voice communication, ultra-high speed Internet and leased circuits as well as TV and FM transmission.

The discussions, according to him, would be followed up with information sharing and technology transfer when required.

If the ongoing BSNL-SoftBank talks materialise and gets a nod from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the new communications technology disruption based on LEO satellites could be a panacea for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s prestigious Digital India initiative which till now, is plagued with unavailability of ubiquitous connectivity.

BSNL has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with SoftBank for cooperation in the areas of fifth-generation (5G) technology, smart cities, Internet of Things (IoT) and robotics.

“Other than OneWeb, we have identified various areas such as 5G and smart cities. They (SoftBank) have various platforms available for devices, communications and data analytics,” Shrivastava said.

The data platform or analytics, according to him, would be a key element for smart cities, and he added that the Japanese company has an expertise in data centres and analytics.

The telco, in association with SoftBank, also plans to develop GST compliance tool to prevent revenue leakage, by way of Robotics Process Automation, Shrivastava said.