75% of gram panchayat connectivity achieved already
NAVEENA GHANATE
Hyderabad
Internet connectivity to every household in Telangana will be a reality by December2023 through the T-Fiber project. Under the Telangana government’s initiative to provide internet connectivity, nearly 10 lakh households in villages will be covered by 2023.
SujaiKarampuri, MD T-Fiber, said: “We have established about 75percent of gram panchayat connectivity at this point of time. While continuing towards 100percent… We have reached the villages now. From there, we will go for commercialisation, and we will start wiring, which doesn’t take much time. As Minister K T Rama Rao directed, we are going to connect minimum 10lakh homes before end of this year 2023.”
T-Fiber aims to connect every household, government institution, and private enterprise across the rural part of the state through optical fibre and provide them with high-speed internet connectivity. The project is being executed in phases and will be rolled out in gram panchayats first, followed by towns and then finally Hyderabad.
Sujai said: “We are 75% GPs connected; it doesn’t necessarily mean that we will connect all gram panchayats in one go. The reason is we look for consolidation per district. We will do it in phases. In Phase1, we will do probably 15 districts of 33 districts. Within those 15districts, we will have 100% GP connectivity”.
He said that urban connectivity would be a latter part of the project. Phase2 will be ULBs and towns and Phase3/2.5 will be Hyderabad. He said: “100% internet connectivity in both urban and rural is little bit of bigger number. Ideal is 90%, as not all people would want the connectivity. In about 3 years’ time, we would reach 90% connectivity”. For the T-Fiber project, the total cost of the project as envisioned is Rs3,800crore.
T-Fiber will provide fibre to the home or enterprise connectivity to over 47 lakh households and 1 lakh public & private enterprises, offices, institutions, etc. in Telangana. End-to-end fiber network will be deployed across 10 zones (31 districts), 584 mandals (block), 8,778 gram panchayats, 10,128 villages up to the household/enterprise.
Sujai said that to begin commercialisation, T-Fibre is “waiting on government decisions and models on how we want to do it. Once it is done, we are ready to go on commercialisation exercise. What the end user needs to pay to use is something we are working on. The number will be disclosed by Minister K T Rama Rao eventually”.
The contract to implement the T-Fibre project for system integration has been given to three contractors. It may be mentioned here that T-Fiber leveraged the infrastructure such as Right of Way, trenching and ducting created under the Mission Bhagiratha. The optical fiber cables were deployed along water pipeline routes which have been already mapped for the entire state.
