The senior officials at Telangana Government at the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) 2018 in Hyderabad on Monday unveiled the much-awaited Telangana Fiber Grid (T-Fiber) program to offer affordable and high-speed broadband service across the state. Under the project, the Government is looking to offer broadband connectivity services to 10 Zones (31 districts), 584 Mandals, 8778 Gram Panchayats, 10,128 villages, 83.58 lakh households and more than 3.5 crore people. The state government will be investing Rs 5,500 crore into the T-Fiber project.
To achieve this, it established a Technology Demonstration Network (TDN), the pilot for the program covering close to 50 government offices and households in the Rangareddy district. The TDN is already established in four villages in Maheshwaram mandal. With the help of the established TDN, a school, a primary health centre, a few houses and gram panchayat offices in Mansanpally, Thummaloor, Sirigipuram and Maheshwaram villages are connected to Secretariat, the Raj Bhavan, CM’s Camp Office and State Data Centre.
The government will be offering up to 1 Gbps of download speeds for households at an affordable price and later on, it promised to offer services such as e-panchayat, telemedicine, e-education, video conferencing and government-to-citizen services such as Mee Seva, IPTV and IP-Phone.
“We are building one of the densest and fastest broadband networks called T-Fiber with a vision to achieve 100% penetration. Through T-Fiber, we aim to provide each and every household of Telangana with optical fibre cable connectivity. We aim to provide government-to-citizen and government-to-government services very effectively with state-of-the-art infrastructure,” KT Rama Rao, Minister of IT for Telangana said.
Earlier, the Telangana state government said that they are laying the Optic Fiber for the T-Fiber program alongside the drinking water pipeline Mission Bhagiratha. And the same has been done by the government as separate ducts are being laid alongside the water pipelines, which also reduces the expenditure.
For now, T-Fiber will be available in four villages in Telangana state, and it will be extended to all 8,778 gram panchayats by December 2018. And for the pilot project, the government has confirmed to invest over 13 crores.
The service partners of T-Fiber are Sterlite Tech, HP Enterprise, Cisco, Corpus, Celkon, D-Link, Micromax, Nokia, and Cisco. All the partners help the government in developing the features they promised.
