:: Railtel Corporation of India Ltd. ::

OFC Backbone Network

Indian Railways have seamless Right of Way along 62,800 KM of Railway Track passing through 7000 stations across the country. The stations in major cities are located in central business districts. With the formation of Corporation, about 35000 KM of OFC has been commissioned by RailTel thus connecting over 3375 stations across India. RailTel is terminating 1 pair of fiber at every Railway station enroute which are spaced at 8-10 Kms for serve its parent organization. RailTel plans to lay over 48000 KM of fiber across Railway tracks thus connecting over 5000 stations on its backbone by 2010.

RailTel has followed a layered approach in designing its network for efficient utilization and management of its network. Accordingly, RailTel has created three layers viz. Access Layer, Edge Layer & Backbone layer. Access layer provides minimum of STM-1 bandwidth at stations normally spaced at every 8-10 Kms. The traffic from access layer is aggregated on to the edge layer having STM-4 connectivity which is available in important locations at every 30-40 Kms. While the traffic from edge layer is finally aggregated on to the backbone layer available in big cities/towns located at every 60-70 Kms.

RailTel has built state of the art backbone network using latest SDH & DWDM technology. More than 400 important cities covering over 25,000 RKMs across the country are connected on backbone network with DWDM (100G)/STM-16 (2.5 Gbps) connectivity presently. However, RailTel has already implemented DWDM network over 10000 RKM to provide 400 Gbps which can be further augmented to 800 Gbps in future. The DWDM network will eventually cover whole of India by end of FY10.

Backbone network have been configured in multiple ‘self healing’ ring architecture which provide for redundancy by automatically redirecting traffic away from failed/ de-graded route for fault-free service. The network supports SNCP and MS-Spring protection schemes. The network has been designed in such a way that full redundancy is available for bandwidth between any two points.

The complete network is managed by centralized network management system (NMS) located at New Delhi with back up at Secunderabad / Kolkata. RailTel has got the unique advantage to meet the quality bandwidth and service requirements from single network. The state of art network enables point and click provisioning of the bandwidth from any where to any where in the country. It enables provisioning of traffic of any granularity with the extensive reach from any part of the country to any other part.