National News: April 2009

BSNL Towers in Semi-Urban Areas to be Leased Out

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) to lease out its passive infrastructure, that includes mainly towers, to other telecom companies in semi- urban areas in the country. BSNL has over 60,000 towers and the most of them are in semi-urban areas where private operators have small footprint, so it has decided to lease out those towers with unutilised capacity to the operators.

Separation of USOF, DoT For Rural Telephony

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) recently recommended separation of the USOF from the department of telecommunications and make it an autonomous body on the lines of the National Highways Authority of India. This step has come up in the light of the fact that the rural telephony is not growing at the desired pace and the disbursement of the universal service obligation fund (USOF) is not effective enough.

Wireless Internet on Indian Rlys by a UK Firm

Nomad Digital, a British Wi-Fi technology major has entered into a joint venture with Indian company Zylog Systems to provide wireless internet access to India’s massive railway network. Nomad Digital said that with this low-cost, high speed data network capabilities, it offered a variety of enhanced communication services to improve communication and monitoring of fleets.

Low-Cost Towers by Ericsson for Rural Connectivity

INR 5,000 crore will be spent by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) of Government of India to ensure cellular connectivity in rural areas across the country. Towards this Ericsson will provide low-cost towers. The costs of these low-cost towers, when compared with the existing traditional towers, would be lesser by over 40 per cent in the tube tower.

$6 bn Govt MMPs Eyed by IT Cos

The government departments have plans to spend $6 billion in 30 so-called mission mode projects (MMPs). So country’s information technology industry in dearth of international contracts are aiming towards these government contracts. This covers a number of the government projects that relate to the filing of income-tax, central excise, transport services, computerising municipalities etc.

Pilot For Passport Seva Project to be Started in June 2009 by TCS

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is set to start the pilot launch of for the Passport Seva Project in June this year. A mock passport seva kendras will be set up in New Delhi to train hires, which will take 3-4 weeks.

The personnel employed and trained by TCS will provide the citizen interface, which will include all aspects of collecting and processing application forms.

Deepinder Bedi
Executive Director
Tulip Telecom, India

“The Bureau of Energy Efficiency, which is a statutory body under India’s Ministry of Power, estimates that, by 2015, India will need 20,000MW to power data centres.”


 

Power management is an integral part of making data centres green. What are the               measures taken by Tulip in this regard?

In this phase of global warming and rising energy costs, industries, individuals and businesses are now recognising the benefits of using green technology. Power deficiency is adversely affecting the Indian economy. And organisations are increasingly becoming concerned about reducing their environmental footprint.

As restricted availability of power is one of the major concerns faced by technology companies in the rural space, Tulip has been successfully experimenting with  virtualisation in it’s existing data centre and going forward newer data centre’s will have virtualisation and consolidation as an integral part. All service delivery platforms  have been designed to have a healthy power/capacity ratio. For smaller data centres, solar panels can be a viable proposition. Solar power will gain greater acceptance and implementation once it’s been given a look of a best alternative. Considered from a practical viewpoint, solar energy is inexhaustible. It is also widely distributed, environment friendly and cost free in raw form.

Virtualisation is the key mantra for going green. Comment.

Virtualisation enables higher performance, efficiency with respect to higher underlying hardware requirement, optimum power utilisation,  and consolidation, henceforth it contributes substantially in having more greener methods of attaining same result. It Virtualisation as a matter of fact helps reduce energy consumption by 80-90% and helps save on. Apart from the green bucks, virtualisation has become the bone marrow of green data centers. Virtualisation helps companies save on hardware expenditure that constitutes 42% of the total expenditure for the IT sector.

What is happening on the virtualisation front in India? What is the Indian and the international scenario in this regard?

There are no such stringent laws made by the Indian Government in this context. However the policy makers have been constantly in the process to implement such eco-friendly technologies. There
have been initiatives to convert urban waste into wealth.

The Bureau of Energy Efficiency, which is a statutory body under India’s Ministry of Power, estimates that, by 2015, India will need 20,000MW to power data centres.  Hence, the adaptation rate of virtualisation in India is expected to witness a growth of 85% by 2011 from the current 19%. As virtualisation increases and improves utilisation, it would gradually gain momentum amongst Indian enterprises. Tulip is on a ‘Go Green’ mission and we have reduced our dependence on diesel generators.

Tannu Singh
tannu@egovonline.net

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