Aksh Optifibre has won an order worth ₹102 crore for supply of optical fibre cables (OFC) for the country’s Defence Network For Spectrum (NFS) project. The company is the lowest bidder, along with the state-run ITI, for ‘Package F’ of the project, which mainly covers West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Sikkim.

The defence telecom project is crucial as the armed forces will migrate all their communication needs to this alternative OFC network and free more bandwidth for commercial telephony.

The companies will be involved in supplying and handling end-to-end deployment of an optical fibre cable backbone network for India's armed forces, Aksh Optifibre said in a statement.

“…Aksh has developed a custom cable design to suit the robust needs to the network without compromising on the strength of the cables, making them highly durable and maintenance free,” said Chetan Choudhari, Managing Director.

The Defence NFS project consists of OFC routes totalling 57,015 km, which is divided into seven packages and is planned to be completed in 18 months.

The project will be handled on a turnkey basis, intended for roll-out of a nationwide OFC network and will be owned and operated by the Defence Services under the Project Implementation Core Group of the Ministry of Defence.

The armed forces had vacated some 3G airwaves in August 2010 after it was assured that the Department of Telecommunications would keep its side of the deal in rolling out an alternative communications network.

This had enabled the telecom department to auction 3G airwaves four years ago.

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