Polycab Telecom, as a consortium-partner with GTPL, was awarded Package B (Saurashtra-region) in Phase-II of BharatNet, world’s largest rural broadband project, to lay 17,000* kms of underground OFCs to connect 3767* Gram Panchayats (GPs) in 65 Blocks across 10 districts of Gujarat, including their Operation and Maintenance (O&M) for 7 years. We, as a consortium-partner with GTPL and a part of the Project Implementing Agency (PIA), executed the Survey, Planning, Supply, Installation, End-to-End integration, Testing and Commissioning of Optical Fibre Cables (Underground) and Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) in Gujarat, with an additional responsibility to execute the core transport-network and connect it centrally at the State Data Centre, Gandhinagar, in Ring Topology.
We set up the Network Management System (NMS) at the State Data Centre (SDC) and integrated the same with the Network Operating Centre (NOC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) Site of Government of India’s Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL). The entire network-deployment was planned on 100% fibre roll-out, with Optical Line Terminal (OLT) at the district-level in an innovatively apt Ring Topology. All of this was done in a manner that the nearest OLT was connected in a Ring Topology with the next OLTs and all of them were connected to the SDC at Gandhinagar. As the ONT-mapping per OLT stood at 20 GPs, each GP (ONT) was connected to Block-location/Exchange (OLT) with a ratio of 1:20.Further, to ascertain that all the 3767* GPs were connected with 100 Mbps bandwidth, with the scalability up to 1 Gbps, a total of 12 dedicated optical fibres were made operational to utilize them for other services and monetization.
Working on a scalable network-design, based on actual surveys, has facilitated us to lay 16,789 kms of underground OFCs and light up 3,711 GPs in Gujarat till date, with 99% uptime and 100 Mbps internet-connectivity.