The State government will soon have Cloud Economic Zones (CEZs) to give major push to the fast-growing Information Technology sector on the lines of the Special Economic Zones (SEZs).
The CEZs will make the Indian IT firms, especially those in the data management and the Internet of Things (IOT) space, more competitive in the global scenario, according to IT Adviser to Government J. Satyanarayana.
Bandwidth cost
The idea is to attract big and evolving IT firms through quality and state-of-the-art infrastructure and bandwidth at competitive price. “The bandwidth cost is very high, almost eight times higher here compared to that in California or Los Angeles. We are proposing to the Centre to facilitate CEZs with 10-year power holiday and other sops in 500 to 1,000-acre space so that the costs are competitive. We have already prepared a draft proposal,” Mr Satyanarayana told The Hindu .
The quality firms would not step in as we are highly uncompetitive in terms of bandwidth and infrastructure, he said. “Unless we create such an infrastructure, we cannot get the biggies like Googles and Facebooks,” he added.
To aid the IT infrastructure, the State is also proposing to have its own undersea Internet cables in Visakhapatnam to reduce dependence on the link in Chennai. As per the data available with the government, the Chennai undersea Internet link is becoming crowded due to increasing consumer base and it impacts the quality at the end point. There are only three undersea cables in India —Chennai, Mumbai and Kochi — and it does not make economic sense to access them from AP.
Centre’s help
In fact, AP tried in vain undersea cabling in 2002. This time round, the government is confident of getting it through with the Centre’s help.
“The undersea cabling needs the Centre’s nod and we have already appealed to the NITI Ayog. There seems to be no issue in getting it done. With the Internet cabling and the CEZs, we will be in a very advantageous position in terms of IT infrastructure,” he said.
