HyFi Hyderabad By Year-End; WiFi Free For First 6 Months!

Chief minister KCR on Thursday held a review meeting with Reliance company representatives and other senior government officials for fast-tracking the 4G WiFi services in Hyderabad and other parts of the state. Last week, Reliance Group chairman Anil Ambani met the CM.

The 4G Wi-Fi services are expected to be rolled out in the western part of the Hyderabad city, where most of IT clusters are located, by September and the entire city gets covered by the year-end. The best part for the Wi-Fi users in the city is that the services will be available free of cost for the first six months.

The government aims to make Hyderabad as a 4G WiFi services-enabled city by end of December, 2014, keeping in view the requirements of the local IT industry and also to enhance the city’s image in the digital broadband infrastructure space.  As part of the first phase, 4G services will be made available in six corporations, 37 municipalities across the state apart from Hyderabad. In the 2nd phase, all other cities, towns and 220 mandal headquarters will be provided with the services. The entire state would be made WiFi enabled by the 3rd phase.

The CM directed the officials to make arrangements for the 4G WiFi services to be available in western Hyderabad by September and for the entire city by December end.  Speaking at a review meeting  ‘Hyderabad 4G WiFi City’ at the Secretariat KCR directed them to develop digital broadband infrastructure in Hyderabad. IT minister KT Rama Rao and representatives of Reliance were present in the meeting.

Reliance state CEO KS Venugopal and coordinator PVL Madhava Rao explained to KCR the progress on the works of WiFi services in Hyderabad and other places in Telangana.

In the meeting, the chief minister assured the company officials that the government would provide necessary support for establishing communication towers and underground optic fibre cable for the purpose. The representatives of Reliance assured the chief minister of meeting the deadlines. They said around `4,100 crore were being spent for providing WiFi services in Telangana. Reliance Communications is laying a 1,700-km stretch optic fibre cable in Hyderabad alone and of this 500 km work has already been completed. Apart from Reliance, other service providers too will receive government support, the CM said.

Faster data transfer capabilities of the 4G technology would also help bring qualitative changes in education, health and agriculture sectors, the chief minister’s office said, in a press release.