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India announces plan to connect 600k villages with optical fiber in 1000 days

indianexpress.com

11–20 of 124 posts

Re: India announces plan to connect 600k villages with optical fiber in 1000 days

#11

Ok, but wouldn’t just providing clean drinking water for example be more critical for most of those families?

I would say both are priorities, govt efforts can't be in sequential priority.

what about villages that already have access to water, should they wait for other things until all villages catchup ?

imagine access to youtube & vast knowledge, may be it will spur the commom folk to take matter into their own hands and improve their lives.

Re: India announces plan to connect 600k villages with optical fiber in 1000 days

#13
post #4
post #3

I think fiber would be the best option for speed.

I think it’s not about speed, it’s about distance that fiber can handle.

That and the fact that the docsis networks here are so congested that it would make Internet quite unusable if strained (I use docsis and it’s a mess currently due to increased demand). I also think fiber has become cheap enough (the cabling) that the cost can be justified. Installing DSL and Docsis is not worth it given the high demand and future upgrades possible with fiber ...

Re: India announces plan to connect 600k villages with optical fiber in 1000 days

#14
post #7

While at it, they should also put up a pole every village (like electric pole) with high range WiFi router. This will remove the last 100m connectivity hurdle and everyone with a WiFi device can get a taste of high speed internet.

Disclaimer : I live in a village in Rajasthan. People will still the WiFi device and sell it for pennies. They don't spare road light in many parts of cities.

if the WiFi devices are ubiquitous, then there would be less incentive to steal.

Re: India announces plan to connect 600k villages with optical fiber in 1000 days

#17

Ok, but wouldn’t just providing clean drinking water for example be more critical for most of those families?

clean drinking water is a much more challenging problem. This is not merely the Govts. fault. People do not want to share existing water with other people and as economy is highly dependent on agriculture groundwater depletion is a serious issue. Most water in India (except Northern part) comes during the 4 months of monsoon. Large scale irrigation projects have a lot of environmental hurdles to overcome here unlike China yet quite a few of them are being worked on rapidly. Most of central India is a plateau and one ambitious plan involved pumping excess flood water in North India during monsoon onto the plateau and transporting it to the South. People are working on many different solutions to the problems as can be done practically.

Re: India announces plan to connect 600k villages with optical fiber in 1000 days

#20
As per article "1.5 lakh gram panchayats in the country have been connected with optical fiber". Each gram panchayats consists from 1 to 10 village. Average may be 4. So now we are talking about branching out the Gram-Panchayat connection to all villages under it's adminnistration. Totally doable. Of course there are still some remote villages/panchayats without Fiber.

2nd important point is monetization model, because these thing require maintenance. Private telecom players have mostly given up to participate in this Bharat-Net connectivity scheme. They seem to prefer their own Microwave backhaul for village cluster. That leaves National Telecom Operator BSNL which is not really in good financial shape.

Still I believe this is doable.

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