RailTel gets 'Aegis Graham Bell’ Awards 2014

RailTel Corporation of India Ltd, a public sector undertaking (PSU) of Ministry of Railways has bagged the ‘Aegis Graham Bell Awards 2014’. This award is organized by Aegis School of Business and Convergence, India with support of Cellular Operator Association of India (COAI), Telecom Center of Excellence (TCOE) and Deloitte. Aegis Graham Bell Awards...

are an initiative to promote innovation in the field of Telecom, Internet, Media and Edutainment (TIME) and to provide recognition for outstanding contributions, said a press release.

RailTel has won the award in the category of Innovative Managed Services Awards. RailTel’s Retail Broadband Initiative – RailWire – was conferred with this award for its unique nature.

RailWire is a collaborative platform to deliver reliable, affordable and high speed Broadband services with various value added services for health, education, entertainment and work@home to common man. RailWire has more than 14,000 customers in India.

RailTel Corporation, a Mini Ratna (Category-I) PSU is one of the largest neutral telecom services providers in the country owning a Pan-India optic fiber network covering all important towns and cities of the country and several rural areas covering 70 percent of India’s population.

RailTel is in the forefront in providing nationwide Broadband Telecom & Multimedia Network in all parts of the country in addition to modernization of train operations and administration network systems for Indian railways.

With its Pan India high capacity network, RailTel is working towards creating a knowledge society at various fronts and has been selected for implementation of various mission-mode govt. of India projects in the telecom field.

RailTel is one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers in the country owning a Pan-India optic fiber network on exclusive Right of Way (ROW) along railway track.

RailTel is in the forefront in providing nationwide Broadband Telecom & Multimedia Network in all parts of the country in addition to modernization of Train operations and administration network systems. With its Pan India high capacity network, RailTel is working towards creating a knowledge society at various fronts.

RailTel has also provided over 10500 KM of network with DWDM systems with 100G/400G capacity which is targeted to be further expanded to additional 14000 KM within a year to cover all major cities of the country. RailTel also has a MPLS network with core on 10G capacity along with NGN system to support various IP enabled services.

RailTel also offers a wide gamut of managed telecom services to Indian Telecom market.

The service includes managed lease lines, tower colocation, MPLS based IP-VPN, Internet and NGN based voice carriage services to Telecom Operators, Internet Service Providers, MSOs, Enterprises, Banks, Govt. Institutions/dept., Educational Institutions/Universities, etc. RailTel is aggressively entering into Enterprise services market with launch of its various services like Data Center, Railwire, Telepresence, etc.

In addition, RailTel with its rich experience in the domain of Telecom & ICT field have been selected for implementation of various mission-mode govt. projects in the telecom field.

Under such initiatives, RailTel is rolling out National Knowledge Network (NKN), National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN) and North East OFC project under USOF scheme.

Since communication is key to transportation, Indian Railways (IR) was earlier solely dependent on Department of Telecom (now BSNL) for their Control & Administrative Communication circuits.

To increase circuit efficiency, Railways started building up their own communication systems from early 70’s based on overhead telephone lines, quad cabels and MW.

RailTel was formed as a PSU fully owned by railways in September 2000 with authorized capital of Rs. 1000 crore with a mandate to modernize railways communication network and to significantly contribute to the realization of goals and objectives of the National Telecom Policy 1999.

It was also decided that railway’s existing telecom OFC assets ( approx 4500 RKM) shall be transferred to RailTel for commercial exploitation. RailTel initiated roll out of OFC across the country along Railway routes from 2001 and created over 25000 RKM of OFC network equipped with SDH based systems by March 2006.