Idukki becomes first district in India to get high-speed rural broadband connectivity
by The Daily Eye Team January 15 2015, 1:59 pm Estimated Reading Time: 0 mins, 48 secsIndia’s first high-speed rural broadband network, the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN), was commissioned in Kerala’s Idukki district on Monday. With this, the district, which has a large tribal and rural population, has become the country’s first district to have all its village panchayats connected to NOFN, the world’s largest rural broadband connectivity project through optical fibre cable. NOFN is the only telecom project of its kind in the country in terms of volume of work, geographical spread of work, reach, quantity of optical fibre cable laying involved and costs. The Rs 30,000 crore NOFN project, which involves laying of about 600,000 km of optical fiber cable, is a part of Central government’s Digital India initiative. The project seeks to link all the 250,000 gram panchayats in the country, located in 6,600 blocks in 631 districts through optical fibre network, providing high-speed Internet connectivity with a minimum bandwidth of 100 megabits per second (Mbps).