Under the NOFN project, the Centre plans to connect 250,000 village panchayats with broadband by 2016. The Union government plans to connect 50,000 villages by the end of this year.
Kerala will become fully connected by March, 2015. Union minister for communications and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad will inaugurate the process of fully connecting the first district in the state on Monday.
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He will be commissioning the country's first hi-speed rural broadband network in the high-range district Idukki.
NOFN is the largest rural connectivity project of its kind in the world. On its completion, NOFN is expected to facilitate broadband connectivity to over 600 million rural citizens of the country.
It is being funded by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) of the department of Telecom under the ministry of Communications & IT. The project was envisaged as a non-discriminatory telecom infrastructure, which will bridge the gap in rural telecom access. It will enable each of the 250,000 lakh GPs to have 100 Mbps of bandwidth, thereby facilitating the delivery of various e-Services and applications including e-health, e-education, e-governance and e-commerce in the future.
In the first phase, NOFN shall be extended to cover 50,000 villages, with the balance 2,00000 expected to be covered in a phased manner by 2016. The project is being implemented by three central PSUs, namely BSNL, PGCIL and Railtel in the phase I.
A key feature of the project is the GPON equipment used in the project has been indigenously designed and developed by C-DOT and manufactured domestically. The project will be centrally managed by BSNL through a high capacity network management system being developed by C-DOT.
With the commissioning of Idukki, which is relatively inaccessible and has a large tribal population, it will become the first district in the country.