Aksh Optifibre Limited said that it has been awarded an order of about 102 crore (USD 17 Million) for the supply of Optical Fibre Cables to be used for India’s Defence Network For Spectrum (NFS) project. The Company emerged as the lowest bidder along with the state run Telco ITI., for Package F of the project which mainly covers West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andaman & Nicobar Islands & Sikkim. 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.
 
The Defence NFS project consists of total OFC routes, aggregating to 57,015 km which is divided into seven packages and is planned to be completed in 18 months time. The project will be handled on a turnkey basis, intended for rollout of a nationwide OFC network and will be owned and operated by the Defence Services under the Project Implementation Core Group (PICG) of Ministry of Defence. This mega network will be deployed with state-of-the-art fibre optic cable technology which will form the backbone optical highway infrastructure and serve as a highly resilient and reliable communication media for the defence sector.
 
“The Company has extensive capability in manufacturing custom made cables for different requirements and geographies and is more than delighted to be a part of the strategically important NFS project of the Indian Armed Forces. Aksh has had a long and successful history of being associated with mega telecom projects of the Government and has added incremental value to each assignment that it has undertaken. This time as well, Aksh 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 & maintenance free,” said Chetan Choudhari, Managing Director- Aksh Optifibre Ltd.
 
The defence telecom project is crucial since the armed forces will migrate all their communication needs to this alternate optic fibre network and free more bandwidth for commercial telephony. The armed forces had vacated some 3G airwaves in August 2010 after it was assured that the telecom department would keep its side of the deal in rolling out an alternate communications network. This had enabled DoT to auction 3G airwaves four years ago. The mega communications network that BSNL will build for the armed forces has several key packages, including the optical fibre backbone, network management systems and a satellite network, and will cost in excess of Rs 13,000 crore.