The national Internet backbone Phase-II of Bharat Sanchar Nigam, that was to put India on par with more advanced nations, has been postponed. The hitch is partly owing to a delay in supply of equipment by IBM Corp, one of the vendors of the project.

NIB-II, which was to be completed by September this year, would now be commissioned only by early 2006, said sources in BSNL.

"Certain teething problems and a delay in delivery of equipment by IBM are the reasons for the postponement. The equipment, mainly storage servers for the complete rollout, was to be delivered by May 30 and IBM defaulted on this," they added.

An IBM spokesperson declined to comment on the issue. The project was announced by BSNL last year. The public sector major was planning to roll out its broadband network across 198 cities to cover 600,000 subscribers.

It was planning to deploy multi-gigabyte, multi-protocol Internet Protocol infrastructure to provide voice, data and video through the same backbone.

NIB-II would have put India at par with more advanced nations. The services that would be supported include, always-on broadband access for residential and business users, content-based services, video-multicasting, video-on-demand and interactive gaming among others.

Audio and video-conferencing, IP telephony, distance learning and messaging were other features that were to be provided under NIB-II.

The subscriber will be able to access the services through Subscriber Service Selection System portal.