RailTel to set up cyber cafes at 82 stations; to slash STD rates

New Delhi, Sep 26 (UNI) RailTel Corporation of India Ltd, a public sector undertaking of the Railway Ministry, today announced the launch of various innovative services for passenger amenities, including setting up of cyber cafes at 82 and Wi-Fi hotspots at 50 stations respectively.

RailTel, which has emerged as the major telecom service provider with a motto 'Connecting India with Fibers', announced these schemes on the occasion of its seventh foundation day function here.

Officials of RailTel said the company had a plan of setting up feature-packed cyber cafes initially at 82 Railway stations under the brand name 'Cyber Express'.

These are next generation 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. The facility will be available round the clock and 365 days a year for the public.

The users can access cyber cafes through pre paid cards or vouchers, which can be used across all the stations, thus providing roaming facility to them.

To ensure that these cyber cafes are not misused by anti-social elements and terrorists, security measures like CCTVs and maintenance of photo-registers will be maintained.

RailTel has already successfully started operation of its cyber cafes at 24 stations across India. These stations are: New Delhi, Chandigarh, Gorakhpur, Jaipur, Jhansi, Jodhpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Asansol, Sealdah, Howrah, Puri, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Guntur, Bangalore, Ernakulum, Secunderabad, Mysore, Vijaywada, Ahmedabad, Mumbai Central, Nagpur and Pune.

The officials said RailTel was poised to deliver another first for the high-end railway passengers by deploying Wi-Fi hotspots at stations to deliver Internet services having Wi-Fi/WiMax enabled devices.

Initially planned at 50 stations, the service will be delivered on WiMax/Wi-Fi based platform. Currently, the services are planned for a radius of 2-4 KM, and are extendable to adjoining areas of the railway stations to retail customers. Plans are afoot to further extend these to cover a large number of residential and commercial establishments near stations in future.

On success of this phase, it is expected to implement the whole project in phases in over 500 locations across the country.

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