Gopal Srinivasan, Director, TVS Electronics, who has assumed office as Chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry's Tamil Nadu State Council.

CHENNAI: BT, a provider of communication solutions, has kick-started a new multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) node here.

The new node is part of the company's 21st Century Network (21CN) programme and signals the setting up of IP backbone in the country.

With the establishment of the Chennai node, Andy Green, CEO, BT Global Services, expected "a lot of work to flow into India".

BT, he said, was investing in new nodes to provide its customers in India with enhanced global connectivity. These nodes would provide seamless, reliable access to and from the Indian facilities to its clients, facilitating their connection to markets and operations across the world.

The Chennai node has currently a total bandwidth capacity of 2.5 Gbps (giga bite per second). This can be further scaled up to 10 Gbps for serving the global datacom needs for corporate and enterprises around Chennai. The node supports voice, data, video and web-based services.

It also supports applications like unified messaging, convergence CRM and hosted contact centre. According to a release, the BT Chennai node can support BPO houses such as Sutherland, Xansa and Genpact and also major software houses such as Cognizant, TCS, HCL, Satyam, Wipro and Infosys.

Mr. Green said BT accounted for two per cent of India's IT and BPO exports. BT was planning to source more over the years, he added. The company employed either directly or indirectly around 15,000 people in the Asia Pacific region (mostly in India). It planned to add 6,000 jobs in India by 2008, he added. "We (BT) are a huge user of India,'' he said. He hoped its business in India would go up to pound sterling 250 million by 2009. Currently, the business was below pound sterling 10 million.

Dayanidhi Maran, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, activated the Chennai node. In his address, the minister said the country required more ILD (international long distance) players. The BT move to set up a node in Chennai justified his decision to liberalise ILD licence and cut the fee.

While welcoming the BT move to set up a node in Chennai, the minister wanted the company to establish a network-operating centre here. Nokia had already done that, he said.

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