According to the Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA), optical fibre laying speed needs to increase nearly 3.6 times to realise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of connecting every village with broadband within 1,000 days.
As per TAIPA, to achieve this vision, the speed of laying cables would have to be increased from the existing average of 350 km a day to over 1,251 km a day.
Further, it added that government projects like smart cities, rollout of emerging technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) etc call for connecting all mobile towers in the country with optical fibre cables (OFC). In addition, 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.
The association added that 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.
According to TAIPA, approximately 2.8 million km of OFC has been laid in the country and 34 per cent towers have been fiberised as on August 31, 2020. Further, it added that 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. This will also facilitate telecom towers to have robust backhaul to cater to high volume data requirement and better quality of services.
