RailTel close to sealing bandwidth deals with ISPs, cable operators

Kavitha Venkatraman in Chennai

RailTel Corporation of India Ltd, the year-old telecom arm floated by the Railway Ministry, is close to sealing deals with a slew of leading Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and cable operators for leasing out Indian Railways’ excess bandwidth for commercial use. The public sector company is in “very advanced stages of negotiations” with several leading ISPs and cable operators and is hopeful of clinching deals with a handful of them shortly.

Top officials of the Southern Railway (SR) told The Financial Express here that RailTel is in the very advanced stage of talks for leasing out both digital microwave and optical fibre cable (OFC) bandwidth to leading internet providers and cable operators across the country. The companies with whom RailTel is in talks include private sector giants like Tata Teleservices and Global Tele Systems. Besides these public sector MTNL and BSNL are also in talks for leasing the Railways’ excess bandwidth. “We are hopeful of concluding deals with some of these companies in a couple of weeks’ time,” senior SR officials told The Financial Express.

Indian Railways has a huge excess capacity of bandwidth across the country and has been planning to put it to good use by leasing it out to private and public sector companies at commercially viable rates. Though the total bandwidth of the Indian Railways is not readily ascertainable, officials say it runs into several hundred mega bytes criss-crossing the country.

For instance, Southern Railway alone has currently a bandwidth capacity of 34 MB in digital microwave, of which only 50 per cent is required for the signalling and other related use of SR and the remaining 50 per cent is idle. SR, through RailTel, is now planning to lease out this excess capacity for a fixed amount to private and public sector users for commercial purposes.

Similarly, SR has another 155 MB of bandwidth available on OFC cables. According to internal estimates, SR requires only 10 per cent of this OFC capacity and the remaining 90 per cent can be leased out to interested companies for commercial use.

On top of it, the public sector utility is laying an additional 24 fibre cables to beef up its signalling system and data traffic. “But our requirement is only for four fibre cables for signalling and other communication purposes,” said sources.