BSNL’s NIB-II postponed due to a delay in the supply of equipment by IBM Corporation

According to news reports, BSNL’s National Internet Backbone Phase-II (NIB-II) has been postponed due to a delay in the supply of equipment by IBM Corporation, one of the vendors of the project. According to BSNL, NIB-II, which was to be completed by September this year, would now be commissioned only by early 2006. BSNL plans to roll out its broadband network across 198 cities to cover 600,000 subscribers. This project, when completed, will deploy multi-gigabyte, multi-protocol IP infrastructure to provide voice, data and video through the same backbone.