Indian state-owned telco BSNL is reportedly planning to lease out its land assets to data centre operators and renewable energy firms as part of a broader strategy to turn around its flagging telecoms business.
According a report in the Times of India on Tuesday, BSNL chairman Robert K Ravi said the telco is exploring ways to monetise its property assets in various states, including telephone exchanges and office infrastructure, by leasing them out or even selling them.
The Times report, citing unnamed sources, claims that BSNL is already in talks with big-name tech companies like Google and Microsoft to set up mobile edge computing centres on its land.
Ravi didn’t comment on the specifics, but did say that BSNL is talking with data storage companies about possible lease deals, as well as wind and solar energy players who sell renewables to state governments.
Like a number of countries around Asia-Pacific, India aims to cash in on growing demand for data centres to support cloud services and especially hyperscale workloads such as AI. According to real estate services firm CBRE, India's data centre market value is projected to more than double from US$4.35 billion in 2021 to just over US$10 billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 15.07% between 2022 and 2027.
Meanwhile, according to Cushman & Wakefield, India's data centre capacity in the top seven cities is 977MW. Based on current data centre projects underway (including new projects and expansion of existing facilities), data centre capacity in India is expected to reach 3.29GW by 2028.
In addition to leasing land assets, BSNL’s turnaround strategy also includes several new service launches such spam blockers, automated SIM kiosks and direct-to-device services, as well as a new logo, the report said.
However, the most anticipated pillar is the launch of its long-delayed 4G network, which is still in testing despite earlier promises to launch in August and then October. Ravi told the Times that BSNL has installed 40,000 new 4G towers out of the 100,000 it plans to have deployed by April 2025.
