Railways offers Net

Indian Railways will set up cyber cafes at 200 stations and will experiment to provide broadband Net access on moving train by the year-end.

Railtel Corporation of India, the communication arm of the Indian Railways, is planning to set-up cyber cafes at over 200 major railway stations across the country by the year-end, Railway Minister Nitish Kumar said on Thursday.

'The first cyber cafe will be inaugurated on Friday at New Delhi Railway Station. Based on the feedback of the users, we are intending to extend to over 200 important stations in the country in the first phase by the end of this year,' Kumar told reporters at the commissioning of the 'optic fibre communication link on Bangalore-Secunderabad, Secunderabad- Vijayawada-Chennai and Chennai-Ooty-Bangalore' here.

He said the cyber cafes would be extended to all railway stations in the country, based on the initial success.

Stating that Railtel had set a target of laying optic fibre cable for over 40,000 km in the country, Kumar said nearly 21,000 km of it had already been laid.

The railways would also experiment by providing broadband Internet access on moving train, the first such instance in the world, he said. The service would be launched on a train this year.

Kumar said Railtel had a total bandwidth of 622 Mbps (1890 channels) of which, the railways requirement would be 30 channels, and the rest would be commercially exploited.

He said the Railtel infrastructure would also be used around five km from a railway station in villages and towns, besides using it for e-governance, tele-education and telemedicine applications.