SYLLABUS SECTION: GS III (SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY)

WHY IN NEWS?

India is preparing to auction off about72 Ghz of airwaves to rollout India’s 5G Fiberization services.

The infrastructure needs for such a rollout requires ,existing radio towers to be connect via optical fiber cables,

Which could prove to be a huge challenge for the country.

The process of connecting radio towers with each other via optical fiber cables is call fiberization.

It helps provide full utilization of network capacity, and carry large amounts of data once 5G services are roll out.
It will also aid in providing additional bandwidth and stronger backhaul support.
The backhaul is a component of the larger transport that is responsible for carrying data across the network.
It represents the part of the network that connects the core of the network to the edge.
Thus, fiber backhaul remains an important part of transport across all telecoms.

Fiber based media, commonly called optical media, provides almost infinite bandwidth and coverage, low latency and high insulation from interference.

With 5G, it will also be necessary to increase the density of mobile towers to provide better coverage to consumers and businesses. This calls for increase requirements for fiber deployment.
To transition into 5G, India needs at least 16 times more fiber.
Currently only 33% of the towers are fiberize, compare to the 65%-70% in South Korea and 80% – 90% in the U.S, Japan and China, according to a 2021 report by India Infrastructure Research.

The fiberkilometer (fkm) per capita in India is lower than other key India’s fkm is just .09 compare to 1.35 in Japan, 1.34 in the U.S. and 1.3 in China.
Ideally, a country needs 1.3 km of fiber per capita to ensure good

There is also a need to increase data capacity in the fiberized towers. These tower sites which are connected via fiber are called fiber point of presence (POP)
To reach the targeted level of fiberization, India requires about ₹2 lakh crore of investment to help fiberize 70% towers.

Government programs like Bharat Net and Smart Cities will further add to the demand of fiber deployment, necessitating a complete tower fiberization.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his 2020 Independence Day speech, laid out the vision to connect every village in the country with optical fiber cable (OFC) in 1,000 days.
To achieve that vision, cables must be laid at a speed of 1,251 km a day, around 3.6 times the current average speed of 350 km a day.

Fiberization remains the Right of Way (RoW) rules.
The Indian Telegraph RoW Rules 2016 were gazette notified by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Govt. of India on November 15, 2016.
The rules aim to incorporate nominal onetime compensation and uniform procedure for establishment of Overground Telegraph Line (OTL) anywhere in the country.
While all States/UTs are required to implement these rules, they are not in complete alignment and still require certain amendments to align.
Several districts and local bodies have not agreed to the RoW policies as notified in those respective States.
These places are following their own by laws overriding the State RoW policies aligned with the RoW rules, 2016
Other central Ministries like the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, National Highway Authority of India, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Civil Aviation, Department of Post, etc. have not yet adopted these Rules, citing their own departmental rules

Source: THE HINDU