After witnessing a huge success in infrastructure sharing for mobile services in rural areas, the department of telecommunications (DoT) has now embarked upon a similar scheme to improve broadband connectivity in rural areas of the country.
Operators willing to share optic fibre network for broadband will get assistance from the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) like they get in the case of mobile services.
At present, all operators contribute 5% of their adjusted gross revenue to the USOF. In a letter to all service providers DoT secretary DS Mathur wrote, ?To proceed in this direction, there is a need to strengthen the OFC network in rural and remote areas and USOF is planning to introduce a new scheme for this?.Currently, several service providers have an optical fibre cable (OFC) network up to the district headquarters. However, backhaul capacity between district headquarters and block headquarters is deficient.
Considering this, public sector telecommunication consultancy and engineering company TCIL has been entrusted with the task of conducting a study and collecting information from service providers and organisations having OFC network in the rural areas, both in terms of fibre capacity and terminal equipment capacity.
With this process USOF will be able to identify the service providers or organisations, which have OFC connectivity between the block headquarters and district headquarters and which is more amenable to sharing, if suitably augmented.