Mumbai, July 14 (IANS): The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) on Friday introduced state-of-the-art 100G Optical Transport Network (NG-OTN) across the country to provide Super Express Highways, in tune with the Digital India Programme of the Prime Minister.

Launching the NG-OTN here, Minister of State for Communications Manoj Sinha lauded the BSNL for upgrading its network to provide modern technology-based Ultra Fast Broadband services to the country.

Sinha said the government has set a target to provide broadband connectivity to 2,50,000 village panchayats by December 2018 and so far more than 1,00,000 villages have been covered with Optical Fiber Broadband connectivity.

The newly-launched 100 Gigabit-OTN will also help service central projects like BharatNet, SWAN, NKN etc.

Sinha added that NG-OTN will cover 100 cities in India with a capital outlay of Rs 330 crore for the project.

The infrastructure in 45 of the 100 cities is already put in place and started operating the NG-OTN on Friday while the rest would become functional under NG-OTN by March 2018.

The project also aims to provide a 99.99 per cent uptime for which a Network Operating Centre is made operational at Bengaluru for giving round-the-clock support.

Besides, it will enhance the BSNL's existing 10G capacity Optical Fibre infrastructure to 100G which would help retail customer base of BSNL in landline, Fiber to the home (FTTH) and mobile services, boost Enterprise Business Segment by providing ultra high capacity in lease lines.

Speaking on the occasion, BSNL Chairman and Managing Director Anupam Srivastava said it has a total customer base of around 115 million and NG-OTN is a step forward to ensure customer delight.

He said the collaboration between BSNL and Fiber Home will provide several such projects to the country.