RailTel Corporation of India

History

The Indian Railways was initially solely dependent on the Department of Telecom (now BSNL) for their control and administrative communication circuits. To increase circuit efficiency, the Railways began building up its own communication systems from early 1970s based on overhead telephone lines, quad cabels and MW. In 1983, the Railway Reforms Committee decided to introduce optical fibre cable (OFC) based communications in IR to provide safety, reliability, availability and serviceability through use of a dedicated network. The decision was also taken to create a network independent of the DoT and replace the existing MW telecom systems (60% of which had achieved end of life) with OFC.

Indian Railways commissioned the first OFC on the Churchgate – Virar line in Mumbai in 1988 for train operation and control purpose, which consisted of 60 km of network across 28 stations. The network was expanded in Central India with the commissioning of 900 km of OFC network in 1991–92 across Durg – Nagpur, Nagpur – Itarsi and Itarsi – Bhusaval sections and in Eastern India with the commissioning of 60 km of OFC network in Tata nagar – Chakradhrapur section.

The second National Telecom Policy in 1999 opened the NLD segment under favourable license in conditions with revenue share to assist mobile network operators to spread their networks across India. In 2000, the Government announced the formation of a telecom corporation to build a nationwide broadband multimedia telecommunication network. RailTel was established in September 2000 as a PSU, wholly owned by the Indian Railways.

Wi-Fi and WiMax

RailTel, in collaboration with Google, provides free WiFi access at select railways stations across India. Google chose railways stations as the location to provide free WiFi because stations have access to reliable power supply, fibre provided by RailTel, and the passengers at a station come from all demographics of India.

The free WiFi service was launched at Mumbai Central railway station in January 2016. In April 2016, the service was expanded to 9 more railway stations. In June 2016, Google announced that free Wi-Fi was available across 19 stations in India and was being used by over 1.5 million people. Google and RailTel plan to provide free WiFi at 100 railway stations across the country by the end of 2016.

In September 2016, Google announced a public WiFi initiative called Google Station. Google plans to expand free WiFi coverage under the initiative to locations such as cafes and malls across India, and later expand worldwide.

Railwire

With the formation of extensive and robust Pan India Fiber network RailTel is in a position to offer various bandwidth intensive application to its customers. One such initiative is RailWire, a joint venture with MSOs to provide Voice, Video and Multimedia access on a single wire at home/office.

Awards

Rail Tel has bagged the 12th National Awards for Excellence in Cost management 2014