Convergence Plus Journal

NEW DELHI -- RailTel Corp. of India Ltd., a public sector undertaking (a 100 percent subsidiary under Ministry of Railways), was set up primarily to exploit Railways' communication assets lying idle, commercially. Railways have built a large telecom infrastructure over years for meeting its own communication requirement for train operation and safety.

RailTel also has plans to lay optical fiber cable (OFC) for providing communication to the Railways as well as for commercial use of surplus capacity. As Railways communication requires dropping of channels at each station, bandwidth will be available at each station. Railways will need 2Mbps to 8Mbps out of 155Mbps. The remaining bandwidth will be used for providing Internet, STD/ISD, and other services in rural and remote areas. Convergence Plus caught up with Ashutosh Vasant, DGM, Railtel, at Convergence India 2003 show, to learn more about RailTel and its services. Excerpts from an interview:

Convergence Plus: What are the services currently provided by RailTel?

Ashutosh Vasant: Our objective is to create a nationwide broadband telecom and multimedia network to supplement the national telecom infrastructure to spur the growth of telecom, the Internet and IT-enabled value-added services in all parts of the country especially rural, remote and backward areas. Our services include bandwidth services (from 64Kbps to 155Mbps and 2.5Gbps), tower space for mounting of antennae (more than 600 towers available nationwide), Internet services, co-locational facilities, virtual private networks (VPNs), national and international long distance (NLD and ILD), and infrastructure services.

CP: What kind of IP services are you providing?

AV: RailTel has already taken ISP and IP II licenses, so as to sell the surplus capacity available on the existing OFC map of the Indian Railways. We also aim to provide manned and unmanned Internet-based kiosks on the platforms and stations, as well as providing connectivity for passenger amenities such as the requirement of taxis, hotel accommodations, road maps, etc. However, having a laptop is must.

There will be multimedia cafes on railway platforms having facilities for Internet browsing, mailing, faxing, xeroxing, videoconferencing, etc. The pilot services of the kiosks and the cafe will be launched at platform number 12 of the New Delhi railway station shortly. The industrial houses that have rail connectivity to their premises can have very secure fiber connectivity as well, coming along the same corridor. We can meet their voice and data VPN requirements. The MPLS-based IP backbone will be engineered for offering services like Internet kiosks, VPN, VoIP, content hosting and data centers, video- and audio-on-demand, Internet gaming, video broadcasting, unified messaging, gateway services for ISPs, etc.

CP: Services like video-on-demand (VoD), video broadcasting and unified messaging are not very popular. What are your plans regarding these services?

AV: SMS was also new at a time. The demand for these services will depend upon the content providers. We only provide the backbone; content providers will have to make use of it. Hutch has already started unified messaging in Gujarat.

CP: Tell us more about your Internet services.

AV: RailTel already has a category-A license for ISP. We are planning to enter in a rather innovative and exclusive way by introducing Internet kiosks at each railway station, making Internet access to remotest areas possible. RailTel would be laying 37,000rkms of OFC cable covering over 3,500 railway stations, where minimum STM-1 bandwidth will be available.

We will initially provide STM-16 on broadband networks, and implement DWDM selectively, in line with the demand. We will be providing STM-1/STM-4 for the edge and access layers, and build the network with SDH for better protection and reliability.

The operational support system will include a network management system for network operations and a service management layer for asset tracking, and a service provisioning and business management system for customer relationship management. The centralised NMS at New Delhi, and four regional NMSs at New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, shall manage the complete network. The network will enable transfer of high bandwidth IP, ATM, Frame Relay, Gigabit Ethernet, and other kind of data services.

CP: What are the most recent developments?

AV: RailTel has recently awarded two of its vital and prestigious contracts for providing the necessary electronics in various routes pertaining to its plans covering the metros and mini-metros, viz., Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune and Bangalore. The first contract for STM-1/STM-4 has been given at the cost of Rs. 26.4 crore for providing 155Mbps and 625Mbps connectivity at 411 stations covering 3200rkms, covering Delhi-Jaipur-Ahmedabad; Kalyan-Pune-Wadi-Chennai; Guntakal-Bangalore; Wadi-Secunderabad-Guntur-Vijayawada-Vishakhaptnam sections. The second contract for STM-16 worth Rs. 37 crore and covering 11,000rkms, for providing 2.5Gbps connectivity, will connect the four metros and mini metros (Ahmedabad, Pune, Secunderabad and Bangalore). RailTel has also opened a regional office in Secunderabad.

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