State-owned full service provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has begun work on a project to boost the capacity of its fibre network from 10Gbps to 100Gbps. The Economic Times cites Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha as saying that the company will deploy next generation optical transport network (NG-OTN) technology in 100 cities via a phased rollout. The installation will take place in three stages over the course of the current financial year (ending 31 March 2018) and is expected to cost around INR3.3 billion (USD51 million). Following the upgrade, BSNL will offer its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) customers increased download speeds of up to 1Gbps, compared to the current peak rate of 100Mbps.
Commenting on the upgrade plan, BSNL Chairman and Managing Director Anupam Shrivastava said: ‘This project aimed to enhance existing 10G capacity to 100G capacity of optical fibre infrastructure of BSNL. This means now in back-end we will have ten times more capacity and will be launching new plans with ten times more speed.’