Dot To Provide Broadband In 5,000 Blocks With Usof Support

[Honest 836]

DoT to provide broadband in 5,000 blocks with USOF support

2 Sep, 2008, 1952 hrs IST, PTI

NEW DELHI : The government on Tuesday said it would provide broadband connectivity -- high speed Internet services -- to remaining 5,000 rural blocks with the financial support from the Universal Service Obligation Fund soon after the allocation of spectrum through the e-auction process.

The Department of Telecom in a statement said today that it would connect 5,000 rural blocks in the country by wireless broadband soon after the spectrum allocation process to cover all villages that come within a radius of 10 kilometres of the Taluka/Block headquarters.

In each block about 40 institutional users such as schools, public health centers, panchayats and community service centers (CSC) will get benefit from the broadband connectivity, it said.

There are total 6,000 rural blocks in the country and BSNL is already providing fast Internet services to 1,000 such blocks.

DoTs initiative is likely to cover the remaining blocks and the CSCs, and the department is also planning to support Wireline Broadband by USOF wherever feasible, the statement said.

To meet the wireless broadband plan, the department has held discussions with technology providers, telecom service providers and Internet service providers to formalise the modalities of tender procedures, specification/deliverable formulation and bench mark settings, it added.

Government's broadband plans will be supported by USOF it said.

[Sadikk 301]

Nice piece of info. kamal keep it up.

[copperco2 24]

a positive news indeed.

[@ksh@T 20]

NEW DELHI: State-owned telecom major Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) plans to extend broadband coverage to 1,48,000 villages over the next six months.

BSNL, which offers broadband across 3261 cities, will expand to 5000 cities by March 2009.

Said Communications and IT Minister Thiru A Raja, “Government will initially connect 5000 blocks by wireless broadband, soon after the allocation of the spectrum, with support from the USO fund. Villages coming within a radius of 10 km of the block headquarter shall be covered by such connectivity. This will benefit many institutional users like schools, public health centers, village panchayats and the community service centers (CSCs) which is meant to provide e-governance and data services to the rural areas. BSNL will play a major role in providing the wireless broadband connectivity as it has done in case of the shared mobile infrastructure scheme. In order to promote expansion of rural wire line and wire line based broadband services, government has recently decided to waive off the license fees for rural wire line.”

BSNL has already floated zonal tenders with plans to procure 93 million lines to extend coverage of GSM mobile services to all the villages in the country having more than 1000 population. The procurement of the lines will be done in a phased manner.

Through this expansion, BSNL will also introduce value added services like mobile TV, mobile broadband, MMS, location based services etc.

Further in order to boost telephony in rural areas, BSNL recently introduced a tariff plan called 'Gramin 75’ under which fixed monthly charges have been reduced from Rs 110 to Rs 75. The plan applies to exchange systems having capacity between 1000 and 29999 lines.

Also fixed monthly charges of Sulabh Plan under Fixed/WLL service in exchange system of more than 29,999 lines have also been reduced from Rs 120 to Rs 99.

BSNL is already providing telephone connections to 550,000 villages across the country. It has extended 11 million GSM connections in the rural areas. The company’s GSM coverage reaches out to about 256,000 villages, which means over 43 per cent of the total number of villages. Besides, it also covers 75 per cent of the villages through its WLL network.

The government plans to complete 500 million telephone connections by 2010 and 750 million connections by 2012.

[via:indiantelevision]

[copperco2 24]

it seems BSNL is going to be the first one in an attempt to secure he rural and urban divide in terms of broadband and telephone penetration...