Five years after MPs protested against the viability of laying telecom ducts along national highways and got the project shelved, the National Highways Authority of India has revived the plan. The NHAI has invited bids for conducting a viability study for laying telecom ducts across 13,000 km of national highways, covering the entire Golden Quadrilateral and the North-South, East-West Corridors, besides port connectivity projects. The revival of the project means re-opening of a major revenue source for the NHAI as it will be able to lease the optical fibre cables to service providers once they are laid. "A study will be conducted on major project lengths, starting with the Golden Quadrilateral and North-South, East-West Corridors besides port connectivity projects. It will assess the bandwidth requirement for audio, video, data communication, convergence for project stretches between various stations, keeping in mind the growing needs in the next 10 years,' said a senior official from the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways. The official said the idea is to assess the nature of existing optical fibre ducts along NHs and the need for more. "As of now, the NHAI has no idea where all the optical fibre cables are lying under or adjacent to national highways. Whenever service providers need to lay cables along highways, they seek permission from us and repeatedly dig up the highway to install them. Since this is a cumbersome process, it has been decided to look at a long-term systematic method to address this issue. The NHAI itself will need a bigger duct network as their automatic toll collection systems will be installed in the next few years,' added the official. The study, to be ready by year-end, will recommend on the number of ducts required for the NHAI's present and future bandwidth requirements and requirements of other agencies and service providers who may become the NHAI's probable customers. The consultant will be asked to prepare a business plan outlining the capital expenditure, operational maintenance and funding pattern to be followed for laying of these ducts. The return on investment calculations, methodology and implementation schedule to realise the optical fibre network will also be assessed. The consultant will be assisted by the NHAI project offices across the country to study soil conditions and technical issues related to duct laying. The NHAI had originally planned the telecom duct laying exercise in 2002 and its board had approved of the project after which the authority invited bids for the same. However, the proposal came under fire when several MPs raised their reservations against it, saying the NHAI was trying to interfere in the telecom sector. The NHAI argued that the move will help the telecom sector as it will get ducts on lease and not have to bother with the long exercise of digging and laying ducts and instead, invest in their area of expertise. The strong protests by political parties ended up in shelving of the project for which bids worth Rs 800 crore had been invited in 2002, but never opened.