RailTel Corporation of India Limited has announced the launch of a host of innovative services aimed at providing more facilities to passengers at railway stations.

A subsidiary of Indian Railways, RailTel, which celebrated its seventh foundation day here on Wednesday, announced that it plans to set up cyber cafes packed with various features at 82 railway stations under the brand name “Cyber Express”. These are generation-next cafes with facilities for web browsing at broadband speed, e-mailing, internet gaming, internet telephony, scanning, printing, photocopying, faxing and video conferencing — all under one roof. Already, RailTel has successfully started the operation of its cyber cafes at 24 stations including Bangalore and Mysore.

RailTel, which has a network of 30,000 km, is poised to deliver another first for the high-end railway passengers by deploying Wi-Fi hotspots at stations to deliver internet services to the passengers having Wi-Fi/WiMax enabled devices. Initially planned at 50 Railway stations, the service will be delivered on WiMax/Wi-Fi based platform.The PSU will further extend these to cover more establishments. near railway stations. On the success of this phase, it is expected to implement the whole project in phases in over 500 locations across India.

In another major initiative, RailTel has plans to become first national long distance (NLD) network in the country to migrate from conventional network to next generation network (NGN) technology to enable operators to further cut STD rates and make STD services  more efficient to subscribers using RailTel’s NLD Network. RailTel already has IUC (Interconnect) Agreement with major operators like Airtel, Idea etc. Initially, the network is planned to be rolled out in 18 cities including Bangalore and Mysore, and will be increased to cover more cities eventually.

With this, RailTel will be able to cover 14 telecom circles currently. On the strength of this network, RailTel will be able to offer not only STD trunk services but can further enhance its service portfolio by offering various value added services like video conferencing to its customers.