CMC to lay optical cable network across city to improve digitisation

CHENNAI: Chennai Municipal Corporation (CMC) will soon lay down optical fiber cable in the whole city to promote Smart Cities Mission projects such as command and control center, to reduce inconvenience to residents, reduce the time to rollout digital services, cut the cost to operators by enabling growth of the digital services, improvement in the quality of digital service, and create infrastructure for 5G.

The corporation has started to develop a proposal for the optical fiber corridor along roads in all parts of city under public private partnership (PPP) model.

On April 30, officials from CMC and Chennai Smart City Limited met with representatives of different private companies to discuss the proposal for laying common optical fiber cable network in the whole city.

G Prakash, Commissioner, CMC, said, “The proposal involves development of a city-wide optical cable network corridor which would be operated and maintained by the private sector.”

An official said “Currently, the optical fiber network is just 30 per cent in the city. We are studying the track rent database to develop the corridor.” The officials of Chennai Smart City ltd also said that they have studied models of few cities such as Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad and commented that a better model can be evolved.