TRAI on Friday reiterated the plan to have a minimum speed of 2Mbps on broadband for 600 million users in the country by 2020 as a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India initiative. The plan also envisages that a speed of 100 mbps will be made available on demand.
TRAI's latest recommendations suggest that by 2017, 175 million broadband connections have to be established. Additionally, broadband access for all village panchayats through a combination of technologies was supposed to be started in 2014 and progressively reach all villages and habitats by 2020.
However, as these targets were on the basis of the national telecom policy, some of them had not been achieved.
TRAI made these recommendations in a paper titled "Recommendations on Delivering Broadband Quickly: What do we need to do?"
The paper reveals some disturbing facts. For instance, it says, "India ranks 125th in the world for fixed broadband (BB) penetration with only 1.2 per 100 inhabitants having access to fixed BB; the global average is 9.4 per 100 inhabitants."
With regards to household penetration within developing countries, India is ranked 75 with only 13 per cent penetration. It has also been pointed out that India falls in the category of the least connected countries that fall within the low IDI group.
Some other important highlights of the conclusions include the suggestion to "align spectrum bands with globally harmonised bands to achieve interference-free coexistence and economies of scale."
Also, there are points that propose auditing of the spectrum allocation, a roadmap for spectrum management, consumer awareness programs for the latest information on EMF radiation that stems from towers and time bound clearance for the installation of towers.
Lastly, the conclusion also states that cable operators should be allowed to be function as resellers of ISP as they can take advantage of their cable network to provide broadband.
TRAI is currently in the middle of a debate around the concept of net neutrality. In the case of net neutrality, its stances has been slammed by web users and net activists.
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