The Central Government Public Sector Undertaking, RailTel has announced on Wednesday that it will be forming ‘edge data centres’ at multiple Railway premises. The current plan of setting up ‘edge data centres’ includes about 102 locations which majorly consists of Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns across the country. The establishment of ‘edge data centres’ will be done by RailTel in an alliance with partners. The potential Business Associates/partners are mandated to be a registered company in India. RailTel also informed in a statement that the setting up of the said centres will involve investment opportunities of about Rs 500 crores.
Advantages of ‘Edge Data Centres’
According to a report from ANI, RailTel has said in a statement that the process of creating ‘edge data centres’ has already been initiated with the issuing of Expression of Interest (EOI) inviting the industry to join hands in this venture. Edge data centres are small data centres that are closer to end-users and devices due to their presence on the edge of the network. Edge data centres allow the organisations to save the hassle of moving the data to far-flung data centres to process it and thus resulting in faster performance and lower latency. This initiative has been planned with a focus on the government’s plan of Digital India and will give it a huge boost. For those unaware, RailTel is India’s one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers that provide an Optical Fiber Cabe (OFC) network of about 60,000 RKM along the railway tracks across the country. The OFC network of RailTel spreads across most of the important towns and cities in India as well as covers some rural areas of the country. The chairman and MD of RailTel, Puneet Chawla has said in a statement that such localised data centres will allow rural areas to be served with low latency applications related to digital skills, financial inclusions, digital literacy and more. He further added that edge data centres will add to the digital economy of the country as it is bound to provide enhanced services and will help in the implementation of digital services in the population of these rural areas. The move of setting up these centres is another step taken towards the digital transformation of the country.
