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RailTel, under the Ministry of Railways, is celebrating its 5th Foundation Day on 29th September 2005. In short span of 5 years, RailTel has considerably progressed in creating nationwide state of the art telecom infrastructure. It has made impressive progress in building high-speed broadband multimedia network. By August 2005, RailTel has laid Optic Fiber Cable (OFC) over 27560 km and commissioned over 23398 km connecting about 2200 towns/ cities including metros, mini metros and other important cities. The backbone network, with capacity of more than 2.5 GBPS, has been implemented in ring / mesh architecture ensuring always on services to the customers. In addition access layer network of STM 1 is terminated at every station enroute which are located at every 8-10 km. RailTel plans to build OFC network on 42,000 route kilometres along railway tracks covering more than 3500 railway stations by March 31, 2008. The network is geographically spread from Arunachal Pradesh to Gujarat and Jammu to Kerala.
AirTel has already started the process of deploying cyber cafes at the 50 Railway stations and is expected to be completed in this financial year. The cafes will not only have Internet browsing but also IP telephony (Voice Over Internet Protocol) , Video Conferencing, E-Mail services etc. This service will be extended to other stations in future. In addition, RailTel plans to launch broadband services for corporate sector and residential customers. For this purpose metro area network in 100 cities is planned. In addition wireless system Wimax is also planned in about 200 cities.
RailTel was formed in September 2000 with the objective to modernize railways’ train operation and safety systems, spur growth of telecom services specially in rural, remote and backward areas, significantly contribute to realisation of goals and objectives of National Telecom Policy-1999 and generate revenue for implementation of Railway projects.
BSC/HK/CK-159/05
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