RailTel to create 'Edge Data Centers' for railways across India

India’s RailTel, a central government public sector undertaking (PSU), announced Wednesday plans to work with several partners to create edge data centers at railway premises across 102 locations across the country.  

“Having such kind of facility at the edge would enable faster performance and lower latency as organizations will not have to move the data to far-flung data centers to process it,” a statement from RailTel said.  

“Latency has always been a problem for data center managers, but in recent times it has become a critical concern because of a wide range of next-generation applications like big data, the Internet of Things, Cloud and streaming services, and other technology trends,” it added.  

In addition, a move was taken by sending an expression of Interest encouraging potential partners to come forward. But such partners are expected to be companies registered in India and make a significant investment, including a $67.8 million mentioned. 

Also, India’s Economic Times reports that the initial capacity of each edge data center at every location will be around 20 racks – five to ten KW each – varying according to need, space, and power requirements.  

Those centers – small-scale data centers located close to end-users and devices – are being adopted by several businesses to overcome the latency problem inherent in using data centers off-site or even in another state or country.  

RailTel is one of India’s largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers; it was created in 2000 to develop nationwide broadband, telecom, and multimedia network to modernize train control, operation, and safety for Indian Railways.  

RailTel owns over 60,000 kilometers along the Indian Railways railway track of a pan-Indian optical fiber cable network. In addition, the network covers essential towns and cities and several rural areas, mainly delivering RailWire, a community-based broadband internet service provided by RailTel in partnership with more than 6,000 communities in India.  

“Edge data centers will enable RailTel to deploy IT infrastructure for caching’ of popular contents to improve the experience of RailWire broadband customers as cached contents will then be served locally instead of traveling a long stretch of network. Similarly, IT infrastructure for peering’ with content players can also be deployed in these Edge Data Centers which would improve cost economics for delivery of contents,” the statement noted.