RailTel will be creating ‘edge data centres’ at railway premises across 102 locations, especially Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns in the country, to accelerate the pace of digital transformation and efficient digital delivery.

Talking about the project, CMD of RailTel Puneet Chawla informed that “With the help of such localised data centres, rural areas can be served with low latency applications related to digital skills, financial inclusions, digital literacy etc. The edge data centres will provide better experience and aid adoption of digital services by the population of these areas, contributing to the digital economy.”

This activity is expected to entail an investment opportunity of over Rs 500 crore. Under the proposal, the envisioned Edge Data Centre’s initial capacity at each location can be of about 20 Racks (5 KW to 10 KW each). However, at individual locations, Edge Data Centre with variable rack and power density can be explored too as per the requirement as well as availability of power, space along with other factors.

The upcoming Edge Data Centres will allow RailTel to deploy IT infra for ‘caching’ of popular contents in order to improve and enhance RailWire broadband customers’ experience as then cached contents will be locally served instead of travelling a long network stretch.

Edge data centres are small data centres located at the edge of the network, where they are closer to end-users and devices. Having such kind of facility at the edge would enable faster performance and lower latency as organisations will not have to move the data to far-flung data centres to process it.

https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/data-center/railtel-to-create-edge-data-centres-at-102-locations-across-india/88854081