05 December 2022
Bridging the digital divide
As part of Indian Railways’ RailWire initiative to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban parts of the country, RailTel in partnership with Tata Trusts and Tejas Networks implemented a high-speed wireless broadband solution at 4,000+ railway stations across India.
The main challenge was to provide reliable connectivity to thousands of remote stations to backhaul WiFi and other traffic. The solution needed be simple, cost-effective yet robust and scalable so that it can be easily replicated across all railway stations. The flexibility to add new services, technologies and scaling to higher capacities was also required.
Tejas Networks solution
Tata Trusts partnered with Tejas Networks to provide one of the world’s largest GPON based railway WiFi deployment across 4,791 stations.
Currently the network is used to provide WiFi services at railway stations, but it can also support applications like telemedicine, e-education, online banking, e-commerce, surveillance, enterprise connectivity, 4G/5G backhaul and e-governance services, helping realize the vision of Digital India.
The Tejas’ GPON and Carrier Ethernet product family was selected as the best fit. Tejas Networks role was to supply, install, commission, and maintain its state-of-the-art TJ1400-1 GPON OLTs (optical line terminals) and carrier ethernet switching equipment along with industrial-grade TJ2100N GPON ONTs (optical node terminal) for delivering high-speed Internet services.
Key features of the Tejas solution include:
Multilevel protection: Tejas GPON solution supports multi-level protection for fibre cuts, splitter damage, ONT and OLT port failures in milliseconds. It uses an open ring ERPS solution for OLT protection and enables 50ms switching on access (OLT) domain. It provides effective isolation between access (OLT) and MPLS domains and has no interoperability issues. It provides a resilient network architecture with no dependency on ONT capabilities.
Flexible, scalable backhaul: The solution uses programmable software defined hardware to work across legacy, current, and emerging technologies and interfaces. The hardware can be seamlessly upgraded to high-speed xPON standards like XGS-PON and NG-PON2 through software updates.
Comprehensive OAMP functions: Tejas GPON product supports advanced fault, alarm and performance management complemented by a powerful visual interface for alarm notifications, fault localization and SLA reporting developed using modern web technologies.
Power savings: TJ2100N can be solar powered and is available for installation in railway stations with erratic power supply in easily portable, ruggedized enclosures with batteries, solar panels and charging units. TJ2100N ONT supports Reverse PoE (RPoE) for corridor/basement installations where power points could be scarce. Using RPoE, ONTs can be powered from subscriber power supply.
Future ready products: TJ1400-1 OLT can be upgraded to advanced, emerging, high-capacity NG-PON technologies through a simple software upgrade. This will enable TJ1400-1 OLT to be used for emerging applications beyond home broadband including high-speed business connectivity (> 10 Gbps) and 4G/5G mobile backhaul.
Environmental impact: TJ1400-1OLT has designed in many power saving features to lower the carbon footprint of the product. TJ1400 is designed using new generation FPGAs for reducing static power, and clock enable/gating logic to reduce dynamic power in FPGAs.
The high-speed WiFi network has enabled a large section of the rural and suburban population to experience the benefits of high-speed, reliable, and affordable wireless internet for the first time. As well as providing connectivity at stations, Indian Railways can monetize the high-performance, resilient, carrier-grade infrastructure to deliver several profitable services to homes, retailers, institutions, and enterprises in the vicinity of railway stations through incremental investments. Ultimately, more than 4,000 railway stations were covered in a record time - 150 days - and today, that network is accessed by 15 million users, consuming over 10PB of data each month.
“Tejas implemented a state-of-the-art 10Gbps Carrier Ethernet network across all the stations that is resilient to fibre cuts,” said Kumar Sivarajan, CTO, Tejas Networks. “Tejas deployed its converged optical access/edge products that seamlessly integrate Carrier Ethernet backhaul with optical broadband access (GPON OLT) to achieve a cost-effective rollout. Our industrial grade ONTs provide a robust outdoor solution integrating PoE technology to seamlessly support numerous peripheral devices such as WiFi access points and video surveillance cameras.”
