Govt. shares indigenous telecom tech with private sector

Telecommunication services in India has been steadily improving despite bureaucracy. The rapid growth of the mobile private sector can take much of the credit in getting the papers moved around. Surprisingly state government telecom entities--BSNL & MTNL--have been keeping up with competition from the private sector. That's not all that the government has been doing for the infrastructure.

The government's telecom technology development division, the Center for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), is an R&D division little known of. The engineers at C-DOT have been working on improving data transfer technologies. Called Gigabit per second Passive Optical network or GPON, the fiber-optic based broadband tech allows convergence of information that flows through to the end-user. Television, voice and data can be transmitted over the same cable over longer distances. According the C-DOT, GPON will reduce repeaters, thereby reducing failure and maintenance points. Deploying GPON based systems will offer connections up to 60km from a central location. Basic technical details about GPON as shared during the announcement explained that the implementation has two parts:

• Optical Line Termination (OLT): this the central location
• Optical Network Termination (ONT): stuff at the end-user's premises

The indigenous development of GPON is not the real story. While as cool as it is that an autonomous government body has worked on this, the government is offering this technology to the private sector--and that's cool. As part of the new National Telecom Policy (NTP 2011), Kapil Sibal (India's Communication & IT Minister) and Sachin Pilot (Minister of State for Communication & IT) in a ceremony transferred this technology to seven private companies. The seven firms can now make use of GPON developed by C-DOT to enhance their (and as a result the country's) telecom network. These seven firms include:

1. Bharti Electronics
2. VMC Systems
3. SM Creative Electronics
4. ITI
5. United Telecoms
6. Sai InfoSystem
7. Tejas Networks