The government is worried about the fate of its ambitious National Broadband Optic Fibre Network as there seem to be no takers, at least for its pilot projects, so far. This has led telecom minister Kapil Sibal to call a meeting with the telecom industry on Tuesday to understand their reasons for giving it a miss and to convince them to begin using the fibre for delivering broadband to villages.
?The pilot projects were completed in three districts on October 15 and, since then, the optic fibre network has been languishing as no telecom service provider is interested in using it to deliver broadband to villages. This means zero revenue for two months and I have been perturbed from day one,? CEO of Bharat Broadband Network (the company created to undertake the entire project), N Ravi Shakankar, told FE.
Confident that the construction work was well on time, Shankar said it would take a maximum of 18 months to complete the laying of the fibre once the government begins work at a commercial scale.
The Rs 20,000-crore project aims to digitally connect 2.58 lakh gram panchayats. The fibre will be owned by Bharat Broadband National, a government company formed specifically for the project.
Meanwhile, three PSUs, BSNL, Powergrid and RailTel, have been tasked with laying the optic fibre across 5 lakh km. Once laid, mobile service providers are then expected to provide broadband connectivity, mainly through wireless technologies from the termination point of the fibre in each gram panchayat to the rest of the village.
However, so far the operators have refused to use the fibre because they say there is no business case. ?There are no devices available in the rural areas for people to access broadband, the mobile phones currently used by rural folks are very basic and until the devices are widely used it doesn’t make sense for us to provide the last mile linkage,? a senior official of a leading mobile firm told FE.
The government is fully aware of this problem. The department of IT (DIT) is believed to have sanctioned computers and laptops to resolve this problem for the three pilot projects.
According to sources, the DIT last week sanctioned computers and laptops worth R25 crore for various common service centres in the pilot districts of Tripura, Ajmer and Vishakhapatnam. However, it might be prohibitively expensive for the government to replicate this across the country.
Also, the experience so far in the three pilot districts has thrown up the need for recalculation of the total amount of fibre that might be needed.
?According to our previous estimate, we needed to cover 5 lakh km. However, this was based on the assumption that the average distance per gram panchayat was 2 km. The actual figure for Tripura is 6 km and for Rajasthan is about 3 km,? Shankar said.
Consequently, BBNL has once again asked the three PSUs to undertake a survey across the country to ascertain how much area might need to be covered. However, Shankar doesn’t feel that the actual requirement would be much higher than the current estimate as shorter distance in other thickly populated districts will offset the increase in costs.