Despite the phenomenal growth of India’s mobile sector, broadband growth has severely lagged behind. Pradip Baijal, the former Chairman of TRAI comments on some of the reasons for this sluggish growth.
We always spoken about infrastructure sharing for last mile. The most important infrastructures that can be shared is backhaul infrastructure. BSNL and other operators should be encouraged by the government and the regulator to share the backhaul infrastructure like optical fibre cable, backhaul spectrum etc. Virtual Private Networks are a way of life for medium to large enterprises all over the world and should be propagated for use in villages. Of 6.5 lakh villages in India, the majority are in the interiors. These villages need connectivity for various institutions like primary schools, panchayats, primary health centres, and so on. Most often there are different schemes working in parallel to provide connectivity to each of these institutions. However, the easier solution is to merge all existing project into one project and resources supporting each of them can be shared. This will bring down cost as well as increase penetration.
Read the complete article in the Business Standard HERE
1 Comment
samarajiva
This should be required reading for the decision makers at the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka, where plans are being made/implemented to build a stand-alone network for government/nenasala use, instead of working with the TRCSL (now both under the Presidential Secretariat and headed by Lalith Weeratunge) to open up the existing backbone infrastructure for use by all operators and by large users such as eSri Lanka.