Fiberisation

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Prime Minister of India in his 2020 Independence Day speech, laid out the vision to connect every village in the country with Optical Fiber Cable (OFC) in 1,000 days. Also, India is preparing to auction off about 72 Ghz of airwaves to rollout 5G services in the country. However, the fiberization is required to rollout such an infrastructure.

Fiberisation

• The process of connecting radio towers with each other via optical fibre cables is called fiberization.
• It helps provide full utilisation of network capacity, carry large amounts of data, and aid in providing additional bandwidth.
• It provides a stronger backhaul support. The backhaul is a component of the larger transport that is responsible for carrying data across the network. 
• It represents the part of the network that connects the core of the network to the edge.

Statistics

• In India, only 33% of the towers are fiberized. It is very low compared to the 65%-70% in South Korea and 80%-90% in the U.S., Japan and China.
• India’s fibre kilometer (fkm) per capita is just .09 compared to 1.35 in Japan.
• The tower sites which are connected via fibre are called fibre point of presence (POP). Currently, India’s fibre POP can just handle data at one to five Gbps speed.

Challenges

• Investment: To reach the targeted level of fiberisation, India requires about ₹2.2 lakh crore of investment to help fiberise 70% towers.
• To connect every village in the country with optical fiber cable (OFC) in 1,000 days, cables must be laid around 3.6 times the current average speed of 350 km a day.
• These tower sites which are connected via fibre are called fibre point of presence (POP). Currently these fibre POPs at a tower site can handle data at one to five Gbps speed.
• One of the biggest issues in the way of fiberisation remains the Right of Way (RoW) rules. While all States/UTs are required to implement these rules, they are not in complete alignment and still require certain amendments to align.

In October 2021, the DoT revised the RoW rules, making it easier to install aerial optical fibre cable in the country. This can enable infrastructure providers to deploy cables overhead via street light poles and traffic light posts.