BSNL broadband set for massive expansion

15 September 2008

State owned telecom operator BSNL will provide broadband connectivity to all districts and blocks in the country by March 2009.

The telco has so far provided broadband connections to 95 per cent of all district headquarters and approximately 44 per cent of the blocks. It also plans to extend broadband coverage to 1.48 lakh villages in the next six months compared to only 30,000 villages at present (See: BSNL brings 30,500 villages under broadband) 

BSNL's broadband already covers 3,261 cities, which will be further expanded to 5,000 cities by March next year.

Communications and IT minister A Raja recently said that the government will initially connect 5,000 blocks by wireless broadband soon after the allocation of the spectrum, with support from the USO fund.

Villages coming within a radius of 10km of al block headquarter will be provided broadband speeds. This will benefit many institutional users like schools, public health centers, village panchayats and the community service centres meant to further propvide e-governance facilities and data services to the rural areas.

In order to promote expansion of rural wire line and wire line based broadband services, the centre has waived-off license fees for rural wire line and BSNL hopes to replicate its success of providing shared mobile infrastructure in providing wireless broadband connectivity.

BSNL has 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 (See: Six telecom vendors bid for BSNL's $9-billion GSM lines contract). Through this expansion, BSNL will also introduce value added services like mobile TV, mobile broadband, MMS, location based services, etc.