At 1500 IST on Friday, Pramod Mahajan, Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Communications and Information Technology, will switch on Reliance Infocomm's telecommunication network across the country, covering 104 cities.

The Reliance plan, still under wraps, will unfold at the 132-acre campus of Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City in Navi Mumbai. The campus, three times the size of that of Infosys, houses fountains, a lake, food courts and a temple, and will accommodate almost 12,000 people when completed.

The glass alley at the national network operations centre, wrapped in plastic sheets, gives a feeling of being at a NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) command station. It is from this domed room that the operations for the entire country will be controlled.

The world over, network operations centres are specific to areas and services they provide. "The centre cuts across physical limits, and is probably the largest of its kind in the world. We have chalked out this architectural piece for which we visited Singtel and Alcatel network operations centres across the world," a Reliance employee said.

Security guards inform that this is the last time any outsider will be allowed entry. It will all be sealed and after the much-awaited inauguration, you can see the centre only from the gallery.

An image of a tense young engineer stares at you from the three-storey high screens, the largest video walls in Asia, as he goes through last-minute trials and fine-tunes systems. On the other side, carpenters are putting in place working models of the Reliance web-stores that will offer the entire range of communications services across India.

In the adjacent building, youngsters are working, sleepless, in simulation labs, called test beds, ironing out glitches.