India's STL Wins Deal to Build PGCIL’s Communications Networks

STL, an industry-leading integrator of digital networks, announced on Wednesday a partnership with India’s largest power distribution company, Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL).  

STL will fulfill PGCIL’s requirement for high-performance, combined network management systems across their regional communications networks through this collaboration. With this multi-year deal worth $22 million, STL further strengthens its relationship with PGCIL.  

As a part of its engagements, STL was supplying optical fiber cables and developed an IP-MPLS network for PGCIL, which owns and operates 90 percent of India’s interstate and inter-regional electric power transmission network spanning 1,72,192 circuit kilometers & 72,126 km of telecom network.  

As such, this considerable transmission & telecom network has to be consistently maintained at an availability of 99 percent & 99.5 percent uptime, respectively.  

According to Statista, with over 560 million internet users, India is the second-largest online market in the world, ranked only behind China.  

“It was estimated that by 2023, there would be over 650 million internet users in the country. Despite the large base of internet users, the internet penetration rate in the country stood at around 50 percent in 2020,” it added.  

This meant that around half of the 1.37 billion Indians had access to the internet that year, it highlighted. “There has been a consistent increase in internet accessibility compared to just five years ago when the internet penetration rate was around 27 percent,” it noted.  

As networking becomes nimble, these massive networks will need an innovative approach to management and orchestration to solve silos, interoperability, and security challenges.  

Praveen Cherian, CEO, Global Business Services, STL, said: “We are delighted to form an association with PGCIL for creating a customized UNMS for managing their massive-scale utility networks. Through our solution, we will provide a consolidated infrastructure with centralized controls for their inter-regional networks. The network management system, with integrated analytics, will bring in efficiency and effectiveness setting superior standards in networks operations management.”  

It is worth mentioning that while leveraging its software-defined networking solution, STL will deliver a customized Unified Network Management System (UNMS) offering advanced automation, programmable configuration, and actionable insights.  

Through this solution, PGCIL will get a consolidated, centralized view of regional networks and will be able to optimize O&M, reduce system outages at the national level and generate performance analytics for the Central Electricity Authority (CEA).