Seven states have put forward proposals to roll out the ambitious national broadband network based on the special purpose vehicle (SPV) model, says Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. The Indian government which is keen to connect 2.5 lakh villages across the country to the national fiber optic network (NOFN) by March 2016 at least, has provided three options for its launch.
Currently, the national broadband network is being handled by SPV Bharat Broadband Network Limited and three Central Public Sector Undertakings (CPSUs) consisting of Powergrid, BSNL and RailTel. But not everyone’s happy with the way the project is being executed. West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha are considering the state-run or SPV-driven model.
If this happens, the current NOFN architecture will be reshaped to fit the much costlier BharatNet program. The government will have to increase the budget from Rs 20000 crores to Rs 72778 crores in order to get BharatNet up and running. Apart from the two aforementioned options to have the broadband network operated by CPSUs or SPV, states were also given the choice to allow private sectors to run it.
NDTV Gadgets (via PTI) reports that BharatNet will be more expensive because it will extend broadband connectivity to district-level government institutions too and not just to villages. Broadband availability is expected to be 99.9 percent, against NOFN’s capacity of 96 percent. Also, the former’s services can go out for only 9 hours in a year, while NOFN aims for not more than 350 hours of down time annually.
Even Haryana is supposedly intent on opting for the state-led broadband roll-out model. Andhra Pradesh thinks it will be able to offer Internet download speeds of 10Mbps at Rs 150 a month via BharatNet.