About 40 per cent works of the T-Fiber project, which seeks to provide high-speed Internet connectivity to one crore households, would be completed by the end of 2018. While households will get speeds of 16-20 Mbps (Mega bits per second), public and private institutes can hope for 1 Gbps connections after the completion of the roll out.

“We expect 40 per cent of the roll out would be completed by the year end,” Jayesh Ranjan, Secretary (Information Technology and Industries), Telangana, told BusinessLine .

“The response for Expression of Interest has been very good. We hope to complete the bidding process and select the implementing agencies to facilitate roll-out of the project. Some top names have shown interest in the project,” he said.

The Telangana Fiber Grid Project (T-Fiber) is aimed at providing high-speed Internet connections to at least one crore households, covering 3.5 crore people in the State. The State has decided to use the trenches being laid for the Mission Bhagiratha (drinking water) project to build the optical fibre infrastructure to all the towns, villages and hamlets.

The Information Technology, Electronics and Communications Department had called for EoIs for implementation, operations and maintenance of active and passive infrastructure for T-Fiber. The deadline for submitting EoIs ended in December, 2017.

The project seeks to connect the State headquarters with 8,778 gram panchayats and 10,128 villages in 31 districts. A Network Operations Centre would be set up to monitor the network infrastructure. A disaster recovery facility too will be part of the T-Fiber project.

While much of the network piggybacks on Mission Bhagitha ducts, it factors in alternative methods of connectivity such as wireless connectivity as a fall back wherever laying OFC is not feasible.

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