Mumbai will be the first city to have India-developed Carrier Ethernet Switch Routers that provide telecommunication services with an additional layer of security for customer data.

These routers can carry leased services, software-defined networking and secure communications. The Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd will deploy these routers across eight sites in the city.

The telecom hardware is being manufactured by the Hyderabad-based Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL) under licence from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. The national telecom carrier and the electronics major signed a memorandum of understanding at the IIT last week to implement the initiative.

This is perhaps the first instance where a carrier-class technology developed at an academic institution has found its way to a tier-1 provider in India in the transport network, a release from ECIL said.

The Ethernet switch routers have been designed and developed by IIT, Bombay. They are the fastest in the business and consume less power. MTNL will will offer carrier-class services to enterprise customers, government agencies and other bodies from each site.

These include Ethernet services, leased lines and MPLS network access from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps. The backbone of the network will consist of 10 Gbps links that would route carrier Ethernet and optical transport network packets.

Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT Bombay said that the deployment of its licensed technology would set a new benchmark in technology adoption from the IIT system to industry.

Peeyush Agrawal, Executive Director, MTNL said an earlier version of the hardware was tried in its data centre after its launch in May 2011.

P. Sudhakar, Chairman and Managing Director, ECIL said the collaboration with IIT Bombay helped bring the technology to the market.

> somsekhar.m@thehindu.co.in

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