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).
January 19, 2018
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. 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. The State is 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. They have already prepared a draft proposal.
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. 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.
