Broadband to connect major Andhra cities by 2007

All mandals, tehsils and districts of Andhra Pradesh will have broadband connectivity with the state capital by June next year. Around Rs 400 crore have been spent for this purpose, said Y L Aggarwal, managing director, Aksh Broadband.

"We are set to complete this project before May-June 2007. Of the 90,000 km fibre optic cable network, about 63,000 km will be aerial cables and 18,000 km will be underground cables. We are about to switch on the network in one district, and work on several others is in advanced stage," said Aggarwal.

Aggarwal was addressing a business session of the 4th international conference on 'Communications Convergence' organised by the Indian Merchants' Chamber.

Other speakers at the business session were Kuldeep Goyal, CGM, BSNL, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, professor, IIT-C, Uday Desai, professor, IIT-Mumbai, K V Seshasayee, director, Israel-India ventures; Amarendra Narayan, executive director, Asia Pacific Telecommunity (Bangkok); Ajay Madan, president, Essar Teleholdings, Arun Dagar, country director, SingTel India, and Avinash Bector, RM, Motorola India.

The network was designed to provide triple play services - voice, video and data.The services include e-governance, e-education, videoconferencing, entertainment, news etc. "To make the project economically viable, our focus will be on high quality cable TV services. We expect the project to earn profits from the second year of its commissioning," Aggarwal said.

He also said although the power shortage in AP was comparetively less they had batteries with 4- 6 hours back up in case of power failure.

Ashok Jhunjhunwala said India had the lowest cellphone call charges. "Even China is talking about this. Very few know that about 30 per cent of the world's wireless technology is being developed in India, because the MNCs find it competitive. In fact, venture funds at Silicon Valley often insist that substantial parts of the projects must be outsourced to India," he said.

However, he said that Indian companies were not doing enough on the quality front. Also they were unduly conservative and averse to risk taking, he added.

He stressed that India would be able to take telecom services into far-flung villages only if it provides the services between Rs 250 and 300 per month.

"We can reduce the monthly charges between Rs100 and Rs150 by designing innovative policies," he said.