Monday, January 12, 2015

Indian State Proposes Public Broadband Company Serving 12 Million Households

The state of Andhra Pradesh in India has proposed creation of a new public company to provide high speed access connections with peak speed of 15 Mbps to twelve million households for as low as Rs 150/month (US$2.40) in the first stage of its about Rs 5,000-crore optical fiber project.

That proposed price is about an order of magnitude lower than retail prices of Internet service providers, which tend to charge about Rs 1,100 per month for speeds in that range.

Andhra Pradesh Fiber Grid Corporation, a public company, aims to provide optical fiber network to villages and remote areas as part of the National Optical Fiber Network project, which is a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India Initiative.

The NOFN has promised to connect 20,000 Indian villages with optical fiber. As planned, the new network will install 700,000 km of optical fiber nationwide.

Andhra Pradesh has proposed to execute the project at cost of Rs 4,913 crore in five years. The NOFN has earmarked Rs 1,940 crore for Andrhra Pradesh.

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