RailTel Corporation of India, a public sector undertaking under the Ministry of Railways, plans to extend its Optical Fibre Communication (OFC) network from about 2900 railway stations covering 30000 route kms at present to 5000 railway stations in the country covering 45000 route kms to provide bandwidth and multi-media services. The seventh Foundation Day ceremony of RailTel was organized at National Rail Museum, New Delhi today.
Speaking on the occasion Shri S.K. Vasishta, Managing Director, RailTel Corporation said that RailTel is now a profit-earning PSU, taking into account the provisional earnings during the first quarter of the current financial year. Shri Vasishta said that the objective of RailTel is to penetrate the corporate segment including banking and financial markets, manufacturing industries, research and educational institutions to meet the fast growing demands of MPLS-VPN services, corporate leased lines and internet leased lines in these institutions. He said that Railtel’s data connectivity at every railway station on the OFC route is enabling large scale opening of Passenger Reservation System (PRS)/Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) facilities thus benefiting common people even at remote stations.
RailTel which emerged as the major telecom service provider with a motto ‘Connecting India with Fibers’ has today announced, on the occasion of its 7th foundation day function, the launch of various innovative services including passenger amenities at railway stations.
RailTel has a plan of setting up feature packed cyber cafes initially at 82 Railway stations under the brand name of “Cyber Express”. These are next generation cafes with facilities for web browsing at broadband speed, e-mailing, Internet Gaming, Internet Telephony, Scanning, Printing, Photocopying, faxing and video conferencing – all under one roof. This facility shall be open 24 hours and 365 days for the public. The users can access cyber cafes through pre paid cards/ vouchers which can be used across all the stations thus providing roaming facility to the users. To ensure that these cyber cafes are not being used by anti-social elements and terrorists, security measures like CCTVs and maintenance of photo-registers will be maintained. RailTel has successfully started operation of its cyber cafes at 24 stations across India. The stations at which these cyber cafes have been setup are New Delhi, Chandigarh, Gorakhpur, Jaipur, Jhansi, Jodhpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Asansol, Sealdah, Howrah, Puri, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Guntur, Bangalore, Ernakulum, Secunderabad, Mysore, Vijaywada, Ahmedabad, Mumbai Central, Nagpur and Pune.
RailTel is poised to deliver another first for the high end railway passengers by deploying Wi-Fi hotspots at Railway stations to deliver Internet services to the passengers having Wi-Fi/WiMax enabled devices. Initially planned at 50 Railway stations, the service will be delivered on WiMax/Wi-Fi based platform. Since, currently, the services are planned for a radius of 2-4 KM, the services are extendable to adjoining areas of the railway stations to retail customers. In future plans are to further extend these to cover large number of residential and commercial establishments near Railway stations in future. On success of this phase, it is expected to implement the whole project in phases in over 500 locations across India.
Reliable Passenger Reservation System (PRS) and Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS), has now became a necessity to service people more productively. RailTel is in the process of shifting these vital circuits alongwith those for train operations and control communication on the Optic Fiber Cable (OFC) and Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network of RailTel thus guaranteeing reliable communication with greater availability. Huge cost savings are expected, as all these applications will be transferred on a unified IP network, which will be highly efficient and scalable. RailTel’s data connectivity at every Railway station and even at important places in a city on its network will also enable large scale opening of PRS/UTS facility thus greatly benefiting common people of the country.
In another major initiative, RailTel has plans to become first National Long Distance (NLD) network in the country to migrate from conventional network to Next Generation Network (NGN) Technology to enable operators to further cut STD rates and make it more efficient STD (National Long Distance) services to subscribers using RailTel’s NLD Network. RailTel already has IUC (Interconnect) Agreement with major operators like Airtel, Idea, TTSL, TTML, HFCL among others. Initially the network is planned to be rolled out in 18 cities and will be increased to cover more cities in the future. The proposed 18 cities are Bangalore, Chennai, Mysore, Coimbatore, Secunderabad, Madurai, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Jallandhar, Lucknow, New Delhi, Bhubneshwar, Kolkata and Patna. With this RailTel will be able to cover 14 telecom circles currently. On the strength of this network, RailTel will be able to offer not only STD trunk services but can further enhance its service portfolio by offering various Value Added Services (VAS) like enterprise VoIP, Video conferencing, etc to its Enterprise customers.
RailTel which is sweeping India with its 30000 Kms and still growing robust fiber network and spreading telecom revolution to remote and backward areas of the country was formed in September 2000 with the objectives to create nationwide Broadband Telecom & Multimedia Network in all parts of the country, to modernize train control operations and safety systems and to significantly contribute to realization of goals and objectives of National Telecom Policy of 1999.
Awards were also given to 38 officers and staff from different Regions of RailTel on the occasion for their outstanding performance in different sector during the year 2006-07. Also present on the occasion were senior officers of Ministry of Railways and RailTel.
AKS/SR/HK/CK
(Release ID :31483)