India Set for Fibre Fever

India's INR 200 billion (US$3.5 billion) National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) plan, which is being funded by the country's Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), is set to create major opportunities for network builders and infrastructure vendors as the Government attempts to take broadband connectivity and digital communications services to the masses.

The network, designed to take fibre connections to the 840 million people who live in India's 250,000 Gram Panchayats (village administrations), will be rolled out and run by a "special purpose vehicle," namely Bharat Broadband Network Ltd. (BBNL). That company will act as an independent wholesaler selling network capacity to multiple service providers looking to reach rural India.

BBNL will lease long-haul, backbone dark fibre capacity from Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL), Railtel Corporation of India Ltd. and Power Grid Corp., which already have more than 670,000 route kilometers of fibre running along their national optical transport backbone networks.

But to reach the 250,000 Gram Panchayats, about 500,000 kilometers of new fibre will have to be laid, running from multiple points of presence (POPs) along the transport backbones.

While some of the new connections will require point-to-point fibre connections from a PoP to a Gram Panchayat, most will be connected using GPON technology, whereby fibres will run from Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) housed at the PoPs to local splitting points, from where dedicated fibre lines will deliver up to 100 Mbit/s of downstream capacity to each Gram Panchayat.

As this is a Government initiative, various state-run organizations will be involved, including Telecommunications Consultants India Ltd. (TCIL) in a monitoring role and Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in support roles.

Ambitious targets
The Government has an ambitious timetable for the NOFN, wanting construction to be completed by November 2013. To help achieve that target, the Government is seeking agreements from local authorities to grant BBNL rights of way to lay the new fibre without the need for any long drawn-out negotiations.

Achieving a speedy delivery will help the Government achieve its aim of proving e-Health, e-Education and e-Government services to hundreds of millions of Indians currently not connected to high-speed Internet infrastructure. A new coordination committee chaired by the Secretary of the Department of Telecommunications, and including the Government secretaries for IT, Health, School and Higher Education, and Rural Development (among others), along with the managing directors of BBNL and BSNL, has been set up to promote the government services effort. The aim is to have Central and State government applications in place for when the network goes live.

Ultimately, the Government is looking to the NOFN to deliver the broadband service penetration currently so lacking in India. The country has nearly 1.2 billion people but currently has fewer than 14 million broadband connections of more than 250Kbit/s. With this initiative, the aim is to have 175 million broadband connections of more than 2 Mbit/s in 2017 and 600 million in 2020.

Deals to be won
With a budget of INR 200 billion, there are some meaty contracts to be had, with the tendering process expected to start within the next few months.

As with any broadband project that involves the laying of new fibre, the majority of the capital will be spent on digging and laying the new fibre, which is a time-consuming and costly process usually undertaken by specialist construction firms.

But hardware and software will need to be purchased, with local companies well placed to win much of the business given the preference for domestic suppliers stated in the new National Telecom Policy.

For the fibre cables, a company such as Sterlite Technologies Ltd. looks to be well positioned. The company tells Light Reading India that it is "looking at opportunities in the NOFN project, though these are initial days."

The scramble to deliver the GPON broadband equipment will likely be the most competitive: Multiple local vendors have licensed GPON technology from C-DOT to develop the kinds of products that will be deployed in the NOFN, while international vendors such as Alphion Corp. and Ericsson AB, both already active in India's nascent GPON market, will be hoping they are not completely overlooked. (See India Telecom: GPON's All the Rage, Seven Vendors Adopt C-DOT's GPON Tech, and .)

In addition, BBNL will be needing centralized OSS systems that can help it manage and monitor the NOFN as well as BSS systems that can be used to ensure that all parties are being properly charged and compensated for their efforts. All manner of companies will be looking to get involved here, though it's also possible that BBNL will need special software developed for its particular requirements, which may lead it to engage with a large IT company that has experience of such matters such as Wipro Ltd..

So the NOFN looks set to provide a significant boost to India's broadband infrastructure sector in the next few years. What's more important, though, is that the NOFN does not become a project hampered by political interference, corruption and conflict, as it has the chance to make a significant contribution to the country's further economic development and enrich the lives of the country's 840 million rural residents.

Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading