Telecom problems in North-East
While frequent landslides in Manipur cause disruption in connectivity, the concern for Meghalaya is poor coverage of mobile service and lack of village public telephones. In Mizoram, the focus area is primarily the hill-top villages that presently don’t have wireless network coverage. Improving GSM coverage and Wi-Fi services in Tripura is imperative and expanding 3G services to all 11 districts of Nagaland is also the need of the hour. With an estimated cost of INR 5,336.18 crore, the project’s cardinal objective is to expand the ambit of telecom connectivity to include all the villages in the North-East. To add on to it, the project aims at ensuring seamless connectivity on national highways in the region. The scope of Telecom Development Plan goes beyond this. According to this plan, the reliability of district and State headquarters connectivity will be increased by providing alternative optical fibre connectivity. The larger idea is to keep the district and State headquarters connected through voice and data transfer despite facing connectivity issues in one route.The aims of telecom development plan
Going by the initial response, it seems that the plan for augmenting telecom services in the north-eastern region is being formulated after conducting the gap analysis. Some of the proposed benefits of the Telecom Development Plan are:- The project will provide 2G mobile coverage in identified uncovered areas of the North-East Region (NER)
- It will provide 2G seamless mobile coverage along National Highways by setting up 321 mobile towers
- It will ensure “reliability of and redundancy in the transmission network at State Capitals and district headquarters.”
- This project will cover 8,621 out of 9,190 unconnected villages by setting up 6673 towers
