The government has connected about 50,000 village households to broadband at subsidized rates as part of the BharatNet project pilot run by the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) and Bharat Broadband Network (BBNL).

“The pilot is running in about 600 blocks of the country. The project aims to reach out to more and more households by reducing the cost of ONTs (Optical Network Terminals) required to provide fibre broadband to households,” Telecom Secretary K Rajaraman said at the CII Telecom Conference on Friday.

The BharatNet project aims to provide broadband connectivity to more than 250,000 gram of panchayats. As of December 7, a total of 180,709 grams of village committees have opened optical cable services.

According to Rajaraman, there is a huge demand for fibre optic broadband connections in rural areas, and it is a supply issue rather than a demand-side one. “If we can provide these services (fibre broadband) at a fairly reasonable price, I think the market will really explode,” he said, adding that the average data consumption in the pilot project in rural areas was around 45 GB per month.

“Today, the combined network of BSNL and BBNL is adding more than 100,000 household connections per month, providing good bandwidth and good connectivity,” Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in response to a question from Rajya Sabha on Friday.

The telecom service operator has overseen the entire operation of BBNL since the government announced the merger of BSNL and BBNL in July.

In his speech, Rajaraman also said that as part of the government’s 4G saturation project, BSNL is working to provide 4G connectivity to every village by next year.

“BSNL has already awarded many passive infrastructure contracts and is in the process of finalizing active infrastructure contracts,” Rajaraman said.

In addition, to prevent distorted connections due to interruptions in fibre optic cables caused by construction activities and other infrastructure, the government will institute a policy that will make it mandatory for people digging roads to notify the fibre optic network owners.