The Telecommunication services were introduced in India soon after the invention of telegraphy and telephone. The first Telegraph line between Kolkata and Diamond Harbour was opened for traffic in 1851. By March 1884, telegraph messages could be sent from Agra to Kolkata. By 1900, telegraph and telephone started serving Indian Railways.
As in the case of telegraph, telephone service was also
introduced in Kolkata in 1881-82, barely six years after the invention of
telephone. The first automatic exchange was commissioned at Shimla in
1913-14 with a capacity of 700 lines.
The Telecommunication services in India have improved significantly since independence. With the opening of Telecom sector to private investment and establishment of an independent regulator, the matter of separation of service provision functions of the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) and providing a level playing field to various service providers including the government service provider, has been achieved. On 1 October 2000, a Public Sector Undertaking, viz., Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), was formed to take over all the service providing functions of the erstwhile Department of Telecommunication Services (DTS).
Initially, the telephone exchanges were of manual type, which were subsequently upgraded to Automatic Electro-Mechanical type. In the last one-and-a-half decades, a significant qualitative improvement has been brought about by inducting Digital Electronic Exchanges in the network on a very large scale. The number of departmental exchanges which was around 321 as on 31 March 1948, has increased to 37,565 by April 2005. Today all the telephone exchanges in the country are of electronic type.
By the end of 2004-05, India was the 10th largest telecom network in the world measured in terms of number of phones. As on 30 April 2005, the network comprises of 99.17 million telephone connections and over 2.15 million Public Call Offices (PCOs). There are over 42.12 million cellular subscribers in the country and the cellular customer base is growing at the rate of over one million per month.
In the field of basic telecom service, there were
31 private licences and two public sector licences at the end of March
2004. After the introduction of Unified Access Service Licence regime in
November 2003, 27 licences out of these 31 licences were converted to
Unified Access Service Licences.
Eighteen more licences were issued for Unified Access
Service during the current financial year. Further, in the area of mobile
telephone, of the total 78 licences, 55 were in the private sector and 23
in public sector. Of the total roll out of telephone connections (basic
and cellular) as on 30 April 2005, private sector accounted for about 47
per cent and public sector accounted for 53 per cent.
Fully automatic International Subscriber Dialing (ISD) service is available to almost all the countries. The total number of stations connected to National Subscriber Dialing (NSD) is over 31,686. In the field of international communications, tremendous progress was made by the use of satellite communication and submarine optical fibre links.
The voice and non-voice telecom services, which
include data transmission, facsimile, mobile radio, radio paging and
leased line service, cater to a wide variety of needs of both residential
and business customers. Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)
facility is available in a number of cities. A dedicated Packet Switched
Public Data Network with international access for computer communication
services is also made available.
