Hyderabad: Power Grid Corporation called for tenders to lay fibre optical network in about 28,000 km covering 1600-gram panchayats in Andhra Pradesh. AP government has told them to complete this project by the end of 2015.
The state government issued orders for the right to lay them for cable networking and requested the secretaries of concerned departments to extend the necessary cooperation and streamline the bottlenecks. The state government wants to provide Internet and Wi-Fi facility to all the villages in the state by the end of 2015. The project was planned to enable the government to provide e-services and e-applications.
The Centre will provide all the material and equipment to lay the fibre optical network in the villages. AP state IT advisor J. Satyanarayana said after the finalisation of tenders the work will start in all villages simultaneously.
All the service providers like telecom service providers (TSPs) ISPs, cable TV operators and others will be given non- discriminatory access to the optic fibre network and can launch various services in rural areas. Various categories of applications like e health, e education and e governance etc can also be provided by these operators. On an experimental basis, a pilot project was launched at Parawada in Visakhapatnam district. Around 30 categories of services are being provided through this project at Parawada. IT advisor J. Satyanarayana said after the completion of laying fibre optical network it would allow IT enabled services to set up BPO centres in rural areas.
He said that the village level network would help the administration to offer more citizen services. He said that the Wi-Fi connection will be provided at Grama Panchayat office and from there any institution or agency can get Wi-Fi connection. Satyanarayana said no service will be provided free including Wi-Fi connections. Everything will be charged.
