By Shubhendu Parth
New Delhi: The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh will inaugurate India's first triple play citizen centric network, the Goa Broadband Network (GBBN) project tomorrow.

 

Completed in record time of seven months, the GBBN is aimed at extending voice, data, and video services to all 300,000 households and the much required backbone for e-Governance in the state.

Speaking to iGovernment, the state Directorate of Information Technology Advisor and Director MN Rao said that the project will also add citizen centric services like telemedicine, e-learning, besides providing the vital link to the Common Service Centres (CSCs). 

While the first phase of the project provides 10 Gbps connectivity up to the Taluka level, the second phase connects all village Panchayats with 1 Gbps link.

"We have already established the connectivity till the Taluka level and connected 100 village Panchayats till date and will connect the remaining 85 villages by end of March 2008," Rao added.

According to him, while the first and second phase of the project have already been completed, the final phase of providing 2-10 Mbps bandwidth to each household in the state will be completed by December 2008.

The project includes setting up of multiple network operation centres (NOCs), with the main NOC at Altinho in Panaji. Besides, each Taluka and village Panchayat will have separate NOCs as part of the GBBN infrastructure. 

Commenting on the project Rao further said that the Goa Broadband Network is unique in the sense that no other Indian state has so far set up this kind of high bandwidth network with the aim of empowering the citizen and enabling online government to government, government to citizen, and government to business transactions.

The state government has already connected 255 government offices and plans are to connect 150,000 households in the first year, by end of December, 2008. Overall the network would be connecting 300,000 households across Goa.

The entire network infrastructure, set up primarily through optic fiber cable, has been built on a PPP model in partnership with UTL, with UTStarcom providing equipment for the project.

As per the MoU between the Government of Goa and UTL, the company will not only set up the project, it will maintain and operate the same before transferring the infrastructure to the state government at the end of the 10-year agreement period.

The agreement also mandates that UTL will be responsible for the upgrade of the infrastructure in the fifth year—after 57 months.

While the overall cost of the project is estimated at Rs 125 crore, the Phase I involves an expenditure of Rs 60 crore, Rao said.

"One of the biggest challenges for the GBBN partner would be to recover the cost through various services," said Ashish Sanyal, Senior Director E-Governance Programme Management Unit (EGPMU) with Department of Information Technology in Government of India.

It may be recalled that Goa is the only state, besides the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar that has not opted for the Government of India's SWAN project.

According to Sanyal, as compared to the SWAN project, the Goa network does not offer the PPP partner a guaranteed quarterly payment option.

Nevertheless, the state government has already chalked out plans to make the project viable enabling UTL to charge Rs 270 per month for dual play services (IP TV and VoIP) and Rs 522 for triple play services, including data.