Indian IT services, consulting and business solutions organisation Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is setting up large data centres in the four regions of the country as part of its Rs 15,000-crore (US$1.8 billion) deal with state-owned service provider BSNL.
TCS and the government owned and run R&D-focused Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) plan 38 deployments in BSNL premises across all telecom circles (or service areas) as part of BSNL’s 4G network deployment,
There will be two large data centres in each of the four zones (east, west, north and south). One will be a primary server and the other for disaster recovery. Then there will be a, presumably smaller, data centre in each telecom circle – 30 in all, depending on the load requirements of a given circle, making 38 deployments altogether.
A TCS representative has been quoted as saying the company is working with hardware supply partners to complete the implementation by June.
As India’s Economic Times news service points out, in May last year, TCS and ITI Limited, a public sector undertaking in the telecommunications technology segment, secured an advance purchase order from BSNL to set up 100,000 4G sites.
The TCS-led consortium, which is responsible for end-to-end planning, design, installation, commissioning and optimisation of the mobile network, includes C-DOT and indigenous telecom equipment-maker Tejas Networks.
The project is a first for a local supplier of 4G and 5G communications infrastructure on this scale. Much similar business tends to go to the likes of Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei. However, as we noted in August 2022, the Indian government wanted the 4G and 5G modernisation projects planned by state-owned operators BSNL and MTNL to mainly go to Indian companies.
However, as we reported in February, there have been concerns about the speed of BSNL’s 4G rollout. BSNL had planned pan-India 4G services for October 2024. This date has been put back to December 2024. The leader of the BSNL employees union suggested at the time that this might be due to delays in the delivery and installation of 4G equipment to BSNL by TCS.
