Three trends are aggressively manifesting themselves in the developing world in this age of information and communication technology.

Firstly, globalization has become a primary agenda among various developmental agencies in the country. Secondly, telecom networks are becoming one of the most dominant agents for service delivery and creation of new organizational structures of national institutions in the country and finally knowledge is becoming the most critical resource in the developing economy of India. Establishing a National Knowledge Network or national K-Net will, thus, provide a logical closure of these global trends with a view to alleviating poverty, removing illiteracy and tackling unemployment, improving safety, leading to economic prosperity and make people feel that they really belong to the society.

Development of similar knowledge networks the world over, whether in the US by the name of US National Lambda Rail or in Europe by the name of GEANT2 (European Research & Education Networks) or South African National Research Network, has all helped these countries to link up the knowledge resources/institutions of research and development on one platform and provide access to various other institutions.

Employing Bill Gates’ “Digital Nervous System” metaphor that a world brain requires a network infrastructure in the same manner as the ordinary brain requires a network of neurons to function. The world wide web (or Internet) has become the de facto backbone of such infrastructure in the recent past. However, wide differences in Bandwidth and interconnectivity among regions and cities within regions have so far prevented the formation of such a national or international K-Net. With this intention in mind, the Government of India had made an effort to create a national K-Net in India itself to effectively bridge the digital divide through the use of appropriate technology and using the telecom infrastructure available with the telecom CPSUs.

Earlier, the State Governments or organizations had invested heavily into IT infrastructure development through the PPP model in silos. But these efforts have been successful to a limited extent only due to many issues like interoperability, duplicity of CAPEX investment, non-identification of common platforms & standards and interconnectivity of these networks. With the result, most of such networks either couldn’t see light of the day or wherever they were created they generated the kind of impact they should have in tackling the digital divide. Most of the SWANs belong to this category. With the result, delivery of many social services like education, health, agriculture, etc. to our population is still to reach the planned heights. The paper highlights the efforts made in the direction of creation of K-net so far and it is considered advantageous for the nation, given the rapid obsolescence of information and communication technology. The K-net or NKN is developing a knowledge platform which would not be obsolete in the coming years and it will be a network, which will become an integral part of the national R&D supra system involving agriculture, education, atomic energy, microbiology and many similar areas of importance to the knowledge economy of the country. This will also play a big role in implementing the national project like National Mission on Education, Broadband agenda 2020 for the country. The national backbone infrastructure, once created, will provide a nationwide OFC-based core and distribution layers to link various government offices and service delivery centres at the village and Panchayat levels as well as at the access levels.

Network configuration is hierarchical with built-in redundancy and reliability. The network consists of a nationwide Core Network connected in a ring or mesh configuration at the first level of hierarchy. The core network is a high-speed network at the top to accommodate network architecture flexibility and security concerns in a VPN-based IP-MPLS networks. The available bandwidth in this core is to provide multiple simultaneous networking sessions between various institutions without congestion. The bandwidth depends on the flow of traffic but at least 10 Gbps or higher. It is possible to connect several institutions of common interest in groups whose network should be independent of the other similar groups and yet have the flexibility of interconnection of the groups so formed, if required. The next level consists of an Aggregation or Distribution network level which again will be in a ring configuration. This consists of a regional ring linking a few cities.

Lastly, the final level is the access layer to have a citywide or regionwide area network for connecting multi institutions, which, in turn, get linked to the LAN on which the entity data centre and user terminals will be located and this LAN will be connected to the Aggregation network either directly or through a suitable Access network. The access layer, which we can call the last mile, is a multi-optic fibre cable-based ring network to deliver access bandwidth. The access or Edge network is a ring or a PON or a point to point link providing access to the core network through the aggregation level.

RailTel is one of the preferred partners to create such a network along with other telecom CPSUs. RailTel, by using its DWDM network, has created majority of core/ distribution and access links created so far in the initial phase of K-net or NKN. The NKN is now slowly evolving to connect 1,000 institutions through a fibre-based access network. It is expected that once it is created, the national backbone infrastructure of NKN will also support the national projects like NME, e-health, etc.

RailTel is also using its extensive radio/ WiMAX network to create 1G last mile access connecting public utilities like Panchayats or health centres or educational institutions, where it may not be possible or economical to lay exclusive fibre-based access. Thus, hybrid access media is being used to integrate such rural public utilities with K-net benefitting people at the bottom of the Pyramid.

Once it becomes a reality, this will be a unique K-Net employed directly not only for knowledge sharing but also for efficient service delivery mechanisms ever created in any country. In Europe, such K-Net has restricted access public domain, Thus, its direct benefit to the public in various social areas is not much. But we anticipate a tremendous boost to our GDP, especially the rural economy with the K-Net.

The sharing and reuse of knowledge network is expected to:
1) increase the quality of technical education and thus the employability of
our technical/scientific human resources;
2) increase literacy rate in the country;
3) bring health facilities at the doorstep of rural population through e-health
applications;
4) improve food production and post-production efficiency;
5) generate new knowledge assets;
6) result in considerable R&D savings annually;
7) produce spillover effects in other sectors (pharma, chemicals, etc.), and thus generate considerably GNP for the country;
8) improve national and local governance through sounder policy formulation; and
9) reduce poverty (as well as other concomitant conditions such as crime, child labour, and corruption).

Thus, we must feel elated that we have found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Our cooperation in the use of technology by utilizing existing national resources to create a nationwide highly innovative K-Net will lead to a completely new working order in the country. NKN is slowly but surely becoming a reality.