State owned company, BSNL which is in the best form to deploy wired broadband on demand across India for some reason has a very laid back attitude. Nonetheless, the company wants to provide broadband services via WiMax in rural India.
Using the USO funds contributed by all other Telcos in India, BSNL wants to connect 25,000 villages on the WiMax broadband Information highway involing a cost of Rs 2,000 crore [$500 mn]. BSNL also wants to setup 50,000 Wimax kiosks in rural India. What we fail to understand is the arrogance of BSNL which is sitting on a large Copper Network, unwilling to serve nor open the network for private companies and thus denying the urban Indian consumer broadband services, making him wait for months in vain.
The most interesting part is BSNL, Kolkatta has promised to clear all the backlog by end of December [You are lucky, if they do so]. They also have ambitious plans to enhance its broadband services from 2 Mega Bytes(MB) per household at present to 100 MB in the urban areas, and 2MB in the rural areas.
The 100MB plan will be implemented in stages. The first phase will see the connection of all the nodes by fibre (Fibre to the node-FTTN+), while the second stage will bring the fibre to the premises (Fibre to the premises-FTTP+). If we see the light at the end of the fibre by 2010, then Kolkatta is the place for broadband hungry persons like me 🙂
Related Reading:
BSNL Bangalore WiMax – A flip-Flop
The State of WiMax in India
