India's large scale rural fibre deployment - Part 1
India has been deploying large scale optical fiber to the rual areas under NOFN / BBNL. Overall the project is not well thought off and as have written previously about it - the choice of “Gram Panchayats” may not be the best option. Furthermore it’s a project about backhual/backbone fiber and not last mile. Project vaguely expects private sector to be doing last mile with no clear plans on how it would be executed.
One of other problems with BBNL is the fact that it is using GPON which is primarily a last mile technology on the backhaul. Thus many of these fibers would be sharing 2.5Gbps port. That may work for now but will have issues in near future if mobile operators try to make use of that bandwidth to backhual their 4G traffic. Furthermore use of GPON makes a large part of such network with no resiliency in terms of multi-path failovers.
With that being said, I looked into their Phase 1 deployment. The page listing the data seems dull and thus I ended up in mapping the coordinates given on their website to the maps. This gives us lots of interesting maps. Due to a large amount of data as well as limitations of Google’s mapping platform, I ended up in categorising the deployment in following:
- North India - Haryana, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal, UP and Uttrakhand
- Central India - Chhattisgarh, MP, Telangana and Jharkhand
- East India - Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Orrisa and West Bengal
- North East India - Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura
- West India - Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharshtra, Karnataka and Kerela
- Union Terrritories - Andaman and Nicobar, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu, Lakshadweep and Pondicherry
Note
- This is very much a loose categorisation. Kerala & Karnataka are in South India but since there’s not much on other South Indian states, it made no sense to add another layer of maps just for two states hence I put them within West India.
- One can select/remove specific states from the map in the view mode by clicking on options in the left side.
- Data is missing for Assam, Karnataka and UP West as it’s missing on the BBNL website. I did write them a mail about it.
- Data is as good as the GPS coordinates on the BBNL website are.
- Maps are little heavy and may take a minute or so to load.
Furthermore there are three types of maps:
- GPs Map - This shows the gram panchayats which are connected the optical fibre (goes in this post - part 1)
- Fibre PoI Map - This shows fibre point of interconnects available to connect to the BBNL network for the purpose of using dark fiber (goes in next post - part 2)
- GPON OLTs Map - This shows the GPON OLT locations of the BBNL Network (goes in the post - part 3)