AP to link all its Mandals, tehsils with optic fibres

Mumbai Mar 17 (UNI) Andhra Pradesh is all set to complete a Rs 400 crore project for linking all the mandals, tehsils and districts in the state with optic fibre cables for providing broadband telecommunication facilities to its small towns and villages, Mr Y L Aggarwal, Managing Director of Aksh Broadband, today said.

''We are all set to complete this ambitious project before May-June next year and of this 90,000 km fibre optic cable network, about 63,000 km will be overhead and 18,000 km be underground'', Mr Agrawal said whit addressing a business section at the 4th International Conference on 'Communications Convergence', organised by the Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC) here.

Mr Aggarwal said the network was essentially designed to render triple play services - voice, video and data - to its customers. The services include e-governance, e-education, video-conferencing, entertainment and news.

''For making the project economically viable, our focus will be on providing high quality cable TV services and we expect the project to earn profits from the second year of commissioning,'' he said.

Mr Agrawal clarified power shortage in Andhra Pradesh was relatively less than that in many other states. ''In spite of this, we have taken care to provide batteries which can provide power from 4 to 6 hours in case of power failures.'' Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at IIT, Kolkatta, said that India was able to charge the lowest rates in the world for cellphone calls. ''Even China has been mentioning this. Indian companies have been employing many innovative techniques such as outsourcing of many business functions. Very few know that 30 per cent of the world's wireless technology is being economically developed in India, because the MNCs have been finding it competitive. In fact, venture funds at Silicon Valley often insist that substantial parts of the projects must be outsourced to India,'' he said.

Dr Jhunjhunwala said that India would be able to take telecom services into far-flung villages only if it was able to provide the services at affordable prices between Rs 250 and 300 per month. ''For 'reaching the un-reached', I am sure, eventually we can reduce the monthly charges still lower to between Rs 100 and Rs 150 by designing innovative policies.'' Prof Uday Desai from IIT, Mumbai, propounded the idea of a 'multi-hop cellular network which will enable us to move towards infrastructure-less, wireless telecom networks'' and that already experiments were being conducted by some researchers.

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