Now you can take advantage of fastest broadband in India for your internet connection provided by Indian Railways public sector undertaking company RailTel (www.railtelindia.com). Speeds up to 10 GB/sec is delivered to the subscriber. For its excellent broadband connectivity service, RailTel has bagged many awards including "Best Carrier of the carrier award 2014".
It is the same internet network which Indian Railways utilizes to share information about trains, availability, schedule etc. among its stations and departments quickly. So there is no reason to doubt about the quality of service it provides. One can confidently avail services like leased line internet, virtual private network, voice carriage, and data center services. RailTel is the only neutral player in the country to roll out the “State of the Art” NGN (Next Generation Switching Network) based Class 4 switch for carrying NLD traffic across the country. NGN converges the traditional voice data & video on to a Single packet (IP) infrastructure & enables Triple Play services on the same network to the customer. No wonder that the IRCTC Next Generation eTicketing System (irctc NGET) uses it.
You might jump up and say that the announcer may visit the national train enquiry or erail to get the railway information and convey it to waiting passengers on the platform.You are partially right, but these are basically railway information portals or websites which work over internet connection. Imagine if this internet connection is hacked or becomes inactive for a while - whole railway operation will be paralyzed. Signals might stop working as one won't be able to determine the exact position of trains on the route, thus making it impossible to decide to show which light - green or red, to a particular train running on that route. Thus Indian Railway and is websites (train enquiry, indianrail .gov.in and irctc.co.in) all require a dedicated broadband network which is fast and secure.
To cater to the needs of railway communication and sharing of information among various companies of railway the idea of Railtel emerged. RailTel was formed in September 2000 with the objective of creating nation-wide broadband, telecom and multimedia network, to modernize Train Control Operation and Safety System of Indian Railways. RailTel's network passes through around 5,000 stations across the country, covering all central business districts, towns, cities, mini/major-metros. All the computers of railway are connected to it. This includes the PRS (Passenger Reservation System) too. An optic fiber cable is laid over 32500 km to connect over 7000 stations.
With a internet backbone in place, RailTel is now in position to provide broadband services to customers outside of railway too which enables it to earn hefty revenues. Bank ATM's, Cyber Cafes, Wi-Fi connectivity on railway stations which you see is all powered by Railtel's venture Railwire (www.railwire.co.in). There are various cheap broadband plans which a user can subscribe to and enjoy high speed browsing including voice and video chat, watching and downloading movies, high speed internet.