RailTel will create edge data centres at railway premises across 102 locations, especially Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns in the country.
The edge data centres will be set up by RailTel jointly with partners. The prospective business associates/partners should be a company registered in India. This activity will entail an investment opportunity of around Rs 500 crore.
The process to establish the edge data centres has been set in motion with the floating of expression of interest (EOI) inviting the industry to partner in this exercise.
The edge data centres are small data centres located at the edge of the network, where they are closer to end-users and devices. Having such kind of facility at the edge will enable faster performance and lower latency as organisations will not have to move the data to far-flung data centres to process it.
RailTel is one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers in the country owning a Pan-India Optical Fiber Cable (OFC) network of over 60,000 RKM along railway tracks. The OFC network covers important towns and cities of the country and several rural areas.
This new initiative of RailTel will give a boost to the Indian government's mission of Digital India.
Under the proposed plan, the initial capacity of the envisioned edge data centre at each location can be of around 20 racks (fivekW to 10 kW each). However, the edge data centres with variable rack and power density can be explored as per the requirement and availability of space, power and other factors at individual locations.
The edge data centres will enable RailTel to deploy IT infrastructure for caching of popular contents to improve the experience of RailWire broadband customers as cached contents will then be served locally instead of travelling a long stretch of Network.
Similarly, IT infrastructure for peering with content players can also be deployed in these edge data centres which will improve cost economics for delivery of contents.
The move will also provide an opportunity to professionally skilled local manpower to participate in this transformation.