RailTel Corporation plans to build 102 ‘edge data centres’ on Railway property, primarily in tier 2 and tier 3 municipalities around the country. RailTel Corporation is one of the country’s leading neutral telecom infrastructure suppliers.
In a statement, RailTel mentioned that it will establish the edge data centres in collaboration with potential partners that should be an Indian enterprise. This action will generate an investment opportunity of roughly Rs 500 crore. RailTel’s new effort will support the Indian government’s Digital India plan.
The project will be completed using the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) approach. The projected capacity of each of the data centres is 20 racks (5 KW to 10 KW each).
According to the statement by RailTel, the data centres will enable RailTel to set up IT infrastructure enhancing customer experience. It will be used for caching of popular content and the same will be served locally. Besides, IT infrastructure for peering with content players would also be deployed in the data centres to cut down costs for the delivery of content.
Puneet Chawla, CMD, RailTel, commented on the initiative, that with the help of such localised data centres, rural areas can be served with low latency applications related to digital skills, financial inclusions, digital literacy, etc.
“The edge data centres will provide better experience and aid in the adoption of digital services by the population of these areas and thus contributing to the digital economy. The move will be another important step towards the path of digital transformation. It will also provide an opportunity to local professionally skilled manpower to participate in this transformation,” he added.
