In the previous blog post, we established that internet connectivity is critical for development and democracy and therefore it should be a priority for the government to ensure that India’s population is connected in the most efficient manner as soon as possible. In this post, we establish that the fastest and the cheapest way of achieving that could to be to use existing 2G and 2.5G infrastructure in the country.
The current government plan to get India connected via internet is to create new infrastructure by laying down fiber optic backhaul to every Gram Panchayat (GP) over the next 3 – 5 years, that is over 250,000 villages in total. The government has been pondering this idea for quite some time now, and the Department of Telecom in conjunction with other ministries has debated various solutions. The Confederation of Indian Industry, in partnership with Analysys Mason, and supported by a variety of telecom operators and vendors presented an extremely detailed proposal to the government on this last year. One of the key findings of the paper was that it is indeed critical for the government to intervene and enable deep broadband connectivity as all countries with successful or rapidly developing broadband penetration have benefited from government investments in infrastructure to kick start the growth, especially when broadband is at less than 10 – 20% penetration. The paper also estimated the cost for providing this fibre access at INR 17,500 cr. While this is a large enough, the USO Fund has enough to cover it.