PM to inaugurate Goa Broadband Network here tomorrow

Panaji, Dec 26 (UNI) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will tomorrow inaugurate the first phase of the Goa Broadband Network that links the capital city with the two district and eleven taluk headquarters as part of promoting e-governance and a transparency in administration.

Disclosing this to mediapersons here today, Goa Finance and IT Minister Dayanand Narvekar said the Prime Minister will interact with people at different taluk headquarters through videoconferencing at a function at Porvorim secretariat complex here at 1615 hrs.

Claiming the project to be the first of its kind in the country, Mr Narvekar said 100 village gram panchayats will be connected with underground cabling by this year-end and the rest of the villages by March 31.

The citizens will enjoy ''a truely converged wide area network'' through the GBBN with all value added services including internet telephony, IPTV, video and data encapsulated in IP pockets across the state, he said.

The government had, under the Public Private Partnership model, entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Bangalore-based consortium--United Telecom Limited--for laying the underground optical fibre cable and providing the people with various value added services through the service centres at a nominal fee.

The network connects the state headquarters to the district and taluk headquarters with 10 GBPS speed. The Taluk headquarters will in turn be connected with every village panchayat at 1 GBPS speed.

All the households will be connected with 2 to 10 mbps speed depending on the need and demand. All the government, semi-government organisations and corporations will have 1 GBPS conectivity.

It envisages provision of services to the government such as IP telephony, online transaction portal, online education, healthcare, online booking nnd video conferencing.

It also provides BPO, Call Centres, KPO and PCOs services besides prmoting e-learning and class room education, diagnosis and advice from hospitals and preventive health care from doctors, leave alone video-on demand and broadcast TV apart from broadband connectivity.

UNI