Trenchless partners sought for Indian broadband roll-out

Trenchless expertise in design, engineering and project execution is being urgently sought by Mumbai-based Reliance Industries. The company has identified 763 Indian towns and cities in which it will be rolling out broadband services, calling for the installation of thousands of kilometres of fibre-optic. This will involve creating a national service, between cities and right up to individual subscribers.
 
Victor Vidyadhar of Reliance, told Trenchless World that the process would be akin to what has been achieved by the Verizon FiOS service in the US. But the utilisation of trenchless technology to complete such a  huge-scale operation in India could be immense.
“We have estimated a total requirement of 200,000km of fibre-optic cable to be laid and a timeline of around two years. At the end of this period, we believe we will have one of the largest fibre-optic networks in the world,” he said.

Mr Vidyadhar continued: “For these reasons, we would like to partner with companies who have experience in rolling out similar large-scale projects in telecom construction. They can be either large companies who can work like our consultants or, they can be individuals. We also want to tie up with companies who have expertise in fibre optic network rollouts.”

“In order to achieve these timelines, we are looking for state of the art technologies that will not only help us deploy faster, but also be easier to maintain.”

Reliance Industries is India’s largest corporation with a turnover of more than US$50 billion for the year ending 2010. The group has diversified into many fields, including petrochemicals, oil and gas, retail and life sciences. It is the only private sector company from India to be mentioned in the Global Fortune 500 list of companies.
Further details: Mr Vidyadhar vn@ril.com