Google Fibre clone: How Sterlite Plans To Provide High Speed Internet In 20 Cities

KOLKATA: Telecom engineers and fibre specialists at Vedanta Group company Sterlite Technologies are finalising the ‘proof of concept’ of a close variant of the ‘Google Fibre’ project to transform the urban home broadband experience in India’s top 20 cities and, in turn, boost high-speed internet penetration.

But unlike the US search giant, which will directly take its ultrafast fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) drive across US cities, Sterlite will deliver super-fast fibre broadband connectivity at 20 to 50 Mbps speeds to urban homes through partner mobile operators.

“We will shortly showcase our FTTH broadband technology blueprint to Bharti Airtel and Tata Teleservices to line up the first wave of partnerships,” Sterlite Technologies CEO Anand Agarwal told ET. The company is initially looking to hook up a million homes by 2016 across Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Chennai.

“Sterlite’s faster home broadband model has parallels with the Google Fibre project as the network and services to end consumers would be similar, but company roles will be different as we plan to work with telcos as catalyst-cumsystem integrators to create a pan-India urban broadband network, unlike Google, which will directly serve US consumers as an internet service provider,” said Agarwal.

Its plan to partner with telcos comes at a time when mobile operators are increasingly focusing on data revenues to fuel future growth.

“A faster fibre broadband option along the lines of a ‘Google Fibre’ can be handy for incumbents Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India or Idea Cellular, which are known to be cherry picking lucrative data customers in urban zones in anticipation of intense competition from Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm, which is reckoned to launch its 4G voice and data services by March next year,” a Mumbaibased sector analyst said, requesting anonymity.

At present, Google’s ultra-fast fibre internet service is reportedly available in Kansas City and Provo, Utah, and will be expanded soon to Austin, Texas. According to international news reports, Google plans to take its faster home broadband service to some 34 US cities shortly.

Elaborating on Sterlite’s fibre broadband model, Agarwal said the company would deliver last mile broadband connectivity to an urban home by plugging its FTTH network to the nearest point of interconnect (PoI) of a partner mobile operator, which could be an exchange or base station.

Agarwal, however, agreed that Sterlite’s FTTH network expansion would hinge on telco demand for using its fibre-to-home technology. “We will ink revenue-sharing pacts with telco partners only after jointly assessing whether a particular urban neighbourhood is ready for fibre,” he said.

Under its build-to-demand approach, the company will extend last mile fibre optic internet connectivity to individual homes and residential high rises only after “it is assured of adequate demand for faster broadband services at the consumer end”.

Incidentally, Sterlite Technologies is a key optic fibre cable supplier for the Rs 21,000-crore national optic fibre network (NOFN) project that will be take high-speed internet to 2.5 lakh village blocks across the country. It has also secured contracts to supply such cables for a mega telecom network that BSNL is building for the armed forces.