Government Plans to Add Fibre Footprints As per the words of Tilak Raj Dua “India needs to install more than 1,00,000 towers in order to provide quality services to billion customers.” Currently, 16 out of 36 states and union territories have matched their policies with Centre’s Right-of-way (RoW) 2016 norms. To ensure global connectivity, the government is also planning to increase fibre footprints by nearly 7.5 kilometres by 2022. Also, the BJP led government is planning to fiberise 60 % of the telecom towers by the end of 2022. In the context, Tilak Raj Dua also marked that availability of robust telecom infrastructure would ensure seamless connectivity and availability of broadband to masses. To provide better connectivity and sustainable broadband future, national policy is planning to offer universal broadband connectivity at 50 Mbps to every person by 2022. This news is reported by ET Telecom first. DoT has Developed Broadband Readiness Index (BRI) DoT has recently developed a Broadband Readiness Index (BRI) which will measure the availability of digital communications infrastructure and policy environment in sales. As per Sandeep Aggarwal who is the chairman of the telecom committee “government should give various incentives to tower firms and telcos to connect 100 % radios on their towers. Not only this, the government must invest in building 6 lakh kilometres per annum of OFC and requisite towers through BSNL”. Peter Reichle who is the co-owner and member of Board of directors at Reichle Holdings (R&M) noted that “India is going to have a huge demand for fibre optic infrastructure driven by BharatNet and FTTH in the coming 3 to 4 years”. Government is also planning to set up a digital fibre map of the digital communications network and infrastructure, including optical fibre cables and mobile towers.
