Optical fibre laying speed needs to go up nearly 4 times to achieve PM's vision: Taipa

NEW DELHI: Optical fibre laying needs to increase nearly 4 times to realise Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of connecting every village with broadband within 1,000 days, Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (Taipa) said on Tuesday. Besides, government projects like smart cities, rollout of emerging technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, internet of things etc call for connecting all mobile towers in the country with optical fibre cables (OFC), Taipa said.

"Prime Minister laid out the vision in August 2020, to connect every village in the country with OFC in 1,000 days. To achieve this vision, the cables would have to be laid at nearly 3.6 times the current speed, up from the existing average of 350 kilometer a day to over 1,251 kilometer a day," Taipa Director General TR Dua said.

He said shifting of traffic patterns, work-from-home, virtual meetings have increased data consumption in the era of the pandemic and it requires huge bandwidth for which fibre penetration is a must.


"Fiberisation enables high-quality broadband which can provision a high-quality broadband with high-speed data, ultra-low latency, and limitless bandwidth with a resilient and robust infrastructure," Dua said.

According to Taipa, approximately 28 lakh kilometer of OFC has been laid in the country and 34 per cent towers have been fiberised as on August 31, 2020.

"To achieve the goal of National Broadband Mission-'Broadband For All' and to address the demands of large bandwidth as the average data consumption for each subscriber is continuously increasing, we need to increase the fiberisation of towers from the present 34 per cent to at least 70 per cent," Dua said.

This will also facilitate telecom towers to have robust backhaul to cater to high volume data requirement and better quality of services, he said.