Indian government to set up $220 million fiber optic network plan

Fiber Optics Weekly Update, Oct 29, 2004

The government has announced a $220 million (Rs 10 billion) fiber-optic network plan for the five-year State-Wide Area Network (SWAN) project. Union minister of communications and information technology Dayanidhi Maran said that a minimum capacity of 2Mbps would be provided to connect state government offices through statewide area networks.

However, bandwidth costs will have to be borne by the states. The state-owned telecom provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) has offered to provide a 90 percent discount to the state governments. Department of Information Technology (DoT) and National Informatics Center are the implementing agencies for the project.