For the first time in India, the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd on Saturday launched the Internet protocol-based virtual private network services in 10 cities across the country using the multi protocol label switching of the US-based Juniper Networks.
The state-of-the-art convergent services will enable its corporate customers, especially banks, financial institutions, service providers and IT firms to drastically reduce their voice, data communication costs and enhance productivity by boosting operational efficiencies.
The Rs 30-crore (Rs 300 million) project initially connects all the leased lines to BSNL nodes in Ahemdabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, Calcutta, Delhi, Ernakulam, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Chennai, and Pune.
"Connectivity to locations in other state capitals in addition to these 10 cities will also be provided through leased lines to enable our prospective customers access the nearest MPLS-VPN gateway without additional cost," declared BSNL Director V P Sinha while launching the services in Bangalore.
Implemented over a high capacity of 155.2mbps (mega bytes per second) dual layer robust MPLS network, the VPN service has a high rate of redundancies in routing capabilities.
The network allows complete control over critical parameters such as bandwidth throughputs, latencies, and availability. It will also result in reducing customers' networking complexity, operational costs by doing away with an in-house technical workforce.
"The cost of the VPN service reduces drastically by 60-80 per cent from the existing leased line network as the points of presence increases," Sinha disclosed.
Besides bandwidth on demand, video conferencing, and Voice over IP, the multi protocol label switching offers a host of other value-added services to transform the way corporate businesses are run.
"With little maintenance cost, the VPN service is easily scalable, and provides 100 per cent secured connectivity, high capacity transmission, faster provisioning, and pay as per use facility.
BSNL implemented the project in a record time, with the Bangalore-based ITI providing the domain expertise and Juniper supplying the switches and about 20 routers with 2.0 and 4.0 gigabit capacity.
"This is the largest order we have executed in India, and look forward to scale up BSNL's operations in other parts of the country with our MPLS technology," Juniper Vice President for Asia South Pacific Brad Gray told rediff.com on the sidelines of the launch.
Juniper has also provided its latest cutting edge technology to private service providers such as SpectraNet and DishNet in India for their VPN networks.
Inaugurating the services, Nasscom chairman and Digital Globalsoft managing director Som Mittal said with the launch of VPN network, BSNL had taken a giant leap in communication technology.
"The service will immensely benefit the IT software sector, especially the small and medium enterprises as they will not only be able to reduce operational costs but improve productivity with such high-speed secured networks," Mittal stated.
Going forward, Mittal said BSNL should expand the VPN network to provide connectivity to disaster recovery centers being set up by large IT enterprises in the country.
"The radical changes in the country's telecom infrastructure has enabled the IT industry to outperform its global counterparts," Mittal added.
The VPN service was demonstrated with a live video-conferencing between Juniper co-founder Pradeep Sindhu in the US and Mittal in Bangalore.
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