TRAI issues consultation paper on national broadband plan

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) today issued a consultation paper on its proposed national broadband plan.

The department of telecom has also made a reference to TRAI seeking its recommendations on the need to review the definition of broadband connectivity in view of future growth in internet / broadband driven by wireless technologies.

Broadband penetration in India is low in spite of the fact that 104 telecom service providers are providing broadband services; broadband penetration is just 0.74 per cent, compared to the teledensity of 52.74 per cent, mainly through the spread of mobile telecommunications. The net broadband addition per month is just 0.1 to 0.2 million in contrast to approximately 18 million mobile connections per month.

Though an overwhelming majority of the population resides in rural areas, broadband facilities are limited to metros and major cities. Out of total 9.0 million broadband subscribers at the end of April 2010, barely 5 per cent were in rural areas.

The low broadband penetration in rural areas is attributed to non-availability of transmission media connectivity upto the village level.

To make all villages broadband enabled, an option being explored is providing optical fibre connectioons to the 375,552 villages with a population of over 500 people.

However, such a network would require laying of about 12 billion kilometres of optical fibre at a cost of about Rs32,300 crore.