RailTel Corporation plans to deploy broadband services in all cities
09 April 2005, THE HINDU,CHENNAI

The RailTel Corporation of India plans to deploy broadband services in all cities and rural areas with various kinds of wireless and wire line technologies. The corporation will roll out the services on its own and in partnership with franchisees.

The Managing Director, K.K. Bajpeyee, told presspersons here today that with the extensive fibre network of 26,000 km at its disposal, the corporation was in a position to offer broadband services to more than 2,000 cities/town in the country and the areas in the vicinity of the POPs (point of presence). The state-of-the-art network would facilitate a whole range of IT-enabled, value-added services such as streaming video/audio and interactive gaming, besides the usual Internet services. The corporation planned to extend the optical fibre cable network to 42,000 km by 2008.

Mr. Bajpeyee said the corporation was also coordinating with the Power Grid Corporation of India and the Gas Authority of India for extending the broadband services. These corporations together covered 400 out of 600 districts. They would supplement the national telecom infrastructure to spur growth in the telecom industry.

The corporation would also focus on setting up integrated call centres in all States and cyber café in all major stations. While the call centres would offer a whole gamut of information on rail travel through a particular telephone number, the cyber café would have facilities such as web browsing, e-mailing, internet telephony, scanning, and videoconferencing. The call centres were now functioning in Patna and Bangalore and the cyber café in some major cities such as New Delhi and Chennai.

The corporation, under the Ministry of Railways, had a tie-up for leasing of bandwidth and services to Tata, Hutch, BPL, VSNL and Bharti. The revenue increased from Rs. 12.5 crores in 2002-03 to Rs. 26 crores in 2003-04 and Rs. 66 crores in the last financial year.

Asked about Internet services on trains, Mr. Bajpeyee said the corporation successfully conducted tests on running trains between Tuglakabad and Faridabad in 2003. The next trail would be on the Taj Express between Nizamuddin (New Delhi) and Mathura. Commercial service would begin by December 2005.

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