Govt eyes 5 lakh home fibre connections by September

The government aims to provide nearly 500,000 fibre-to-home (broadband) connections by September, a top executive told ET.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT’s rural network of 400,000 Common Service Centres has rolled out the facility after the Department of Telecommunications entrusted it to take the ambitious BharatNet fibre optic network to every last mile in the country.

The venture has already provided 50,000 fibre connections in the last one month.

The telecom department assigned CSCs the task of operating and maintaining the Bharat-Net fibre optic backbone in July 2019. Most of the connections are in three states — Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, with UP constituting nearly 50% of the total connections so far, said Dinesh Tyagi CEO of CSC eGovernance Services.