Citizens yet to benefit from Goa Broad Band Network project

PANAJI: Commissioned in August 2009, the usage of Goa's ambitious and unique Goa Broad Band Network (GBBN) project is restricted largely to the state administration and the benefits are yet to fully reach the citizenry.
Director of information technology Nilesh Phaldesai said that the government is aggressively trying to roll out services to the citizens via the GBBN."The road is constructed. Now there are a few vehicles. We have to put more vehicles to use it fully," Phaldesai said.
UTL's internet service - Gwave - is operated on fibre-optic cable ensuring high speeds to the public but the service has only about 350 clients. Most of these are corporates and high-end hotels and fewer households. But UTL officials defended this by saying GWave was launched only in February 2011. "It took six months to launch. Whatever (clients) we have in hand are of one year. But our service is superior, where others give connectivity on copper wire, we are the first to give end-to-end fibre-optic connectivity. Besides, our service is good and we have five "fault rectification teams" on the road and two or three engineers in every taluka," said Tejas Desai of UTL.
The GBBN project was commissioned on a private-public-partnership (PPP) basis with United Telecom Limited at a cost of 200-crore payable over 10 years.
UTL officials claimed that with GBBN, Goa became the first state in the country where complete communication media is optical fibre, the first state to connect all village panchayats and first state with 10Gbps backbone (state headquarters to district connectivity) and 1Gbps distribution layer structure to village panchayats. In other states, the backbone is only 10 or 20 Mbps making Goa's state to district connectivity "1000 times faster."
The structure is robust connecting the government secretariat to the collectorates to the mamlatdars and the 189 village panchayats. Also, with connectivity arising from 225 offices POP (point of presence), connectivity has extended to over 1500 offices and government departments, UTL officials claimed.
Director of IT Nilesh Phaldesai refuted the suggestion that GBBN is underutilized. "It is being used to the best possible extent but it can be improved," he said.
Pointing to the Goa government's e-services portal, Phaldesai said GBBN supports about 129 e-services in about 23 government departments like transport, tourism, panchayats, collectorates, civil supplies, etc. There are also 42 e-forms facilitating services like inclusion of name in electoral roll, birth certificate, residence certificates, etc. He also said that government departments have to gear up with their e-governance services.
More citizen-centric services like payment of electricity and water bills could be done on the GBBN facility.
"But integration needs to be done. Payment gateway is needed so people can pay via their credit cards. The government is working on these aggressively," Phaldesai said.
UTL is also confident of taking GBBN to the citizens. Tejas Desai said that while the first three years went into setting up the network, the focus for the next seven years will be the private sector.