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.
As mentioned in part 1 of this post, this part contains the map of GPON OLTs for BBNL network. You like to see part 2 of this post which has map of the fiber point of interconnects.
As mentioned in part 1 of the post, this part contains the map of fibre point of interconnects for BBNL network. This is one of the interesting parts of the network and if executed well, it can be a really great middle mile. Though I haven’t seen any ground deployment as yet of the same. Will explore more in PoIs around my city.
Just finished with SANOG 26 conference and tutorials. It went very nice. Interestingly this time conference did not start early morning like it did in SANOG 24 at Noida. It was rather late in afternoon. Also, on very good note - there were less Govt. bureaucrats to bore attendees with usual stuff they always talk about but have very little idea. One specific interesting presentation was Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless in India by Prof Abhay Karandikar (from IIT Mumbai). In start I felt it to be usual crappy 5G talk but later realized it was much more interesting. I loved the idea “Have 2Mbps everywhere static broadband and not some absurd number on mobile wireless broadband as we hear in case of 3G/4G. Although 2Mbps now is much slower and I would rather suggest that we target for 10Mbps everywhere (something which can be supported by copper/coax/fiber hybrid) but anyways it was nice refreshing talk. His thoughts were interesting but mostly impractical since had high dependence on useless project like NOFN. For the next part, we had a nice theme of keeping network simple which everyone kind of liked. Simplicity in Network Design & Deployments by Dany Pinto (from Colt) and Unified Forwarding with Segment Routing by Mohan Nanduri (from Microsoft Azure Cloud WAN team) were part of that. Santanu Dasgupta gave a presentation about Challenges of L2NID based Metro-E Architecture for vCPE/NFV Deployments and kind of confused everyone. :P
Today I came across a nicely written article in Business Standard on NOFN. Article’s title was “NOFN: A distant dream”. I must say it is one of good articles I have seen so far on the topic and most of other articles appeared to be factually incorrect and more like Press Releases of UPA.
According to a top official at the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the project was conceptualised without a proper study. “NOFN would connect 2.5 lakh villages from the block level. But, no study was done on the details on optic fibre still the Block level, and how healthy those fibres are. Experts say that the NOFN project does not include service offering. It is just about the laying of optic fibres. For end-to-end services, service providers will have to set up their own infrastructure at the gram panchayat level. While the initial cost was projected at Rs 20,000 crore for the NOFN project, private companies will need to pump in much more than this amount to offer services to end customers.