RailTel to roll out edge data centres at 100 locations soon

RailTel along with Techno Electric will soon roll out edge data centres at 100 locations across smaller cities in the country to push digital transformation.  

Edge data centres (EDC) are small data centres in a 10X10 room located at the edge of the network, where they are closer to end-users and devices. This enables faster performance and lower latency as organisations will not have to move the data to far-flung data centres to process it.

The idea behind the EDC is to serve hyperlocal content to populations around it and these will be all along railway tracks. With the help of localised data centres, smaller cities and rural areas can be served with low latency applications related to digital skills, financial inclusions and digital literacy.

“This year we should have 5-10 edge data centres by end of this year. But the next year we expect the things will be—after we see the experience—will be smoother,” RailTel CMD Sanjai Kumar told investors after company’s Q1FY25 results were announced on August 2.

Techno electric is already surveying the locations to launch the services. Traditional data centre sites are selected in large part based on geographical considerations, including power availability and cost, customer demand, real-estate price, and physical and security risk factors.

However, for the edge data centre, location will also be dictated by the latency requirements of the service it supports and access to network resources.

RailTel is one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers in the country owning a Pan-India Optical Fiber Cable (OFC) network of over 60,000 RKM (route kilometre) along Railway track.

Edge computing is the delivery of computing solutions (applications and services) at the logical extremes of the network edge, closer to the end-user. For example, vast amounts of IoT or machine-to-machine data can be processed by edge computing and only the most relevant and valuable information is sent to a centralised data centre, thus saving the scarce network resources.

Edge computing provides services in a context of reduced network costs, application latency and thereby provides better customer experience.

Centralised data centres or hyper-scale cloud provider models deliver large-scale resources and gain advantage via economies of scale. Parties share capacity, critical infrastructure, applications, cloud services, staff and peering in one location.