RailTel gets Navratna company status, will get help in infrastructure and business expansion

Raipur. RailTel Corporation of India Limited (RailTel), a Central Public Sector Enterprise (CPSE) under the Ministry of Railways, has received the status of Navratna Company. RailTel has been granted the status of Navratna Company by the Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) of the Ministry of Finance.

RailTel has achieved this feat within just 24 years of its establishment. It is worth noting that RailTel was established on 26 September 2000 as an in-house telecom service provider for Indian Railways. Later, RailTel rapidly became one of the largest telecom infrastructure providers in India. With the status of Navratna company, RailTel will now have more autonomy, which will enable it to expand its network through higher capital expenditure allocation. Not only this, the status of Navratna will also prove to be helpful for RailTel to expand business internationally.

RailTel has an extensive optical fibre network of 62,000 route kilometres along railway tracks, as well as 21,000 kilometres of network in urban areas. Apart from this, RailTel has more than 11,000 Points of Presence (PoPs) and 1,100 telecom towers across the country. RailTel has built one of the world’s largest integrated public Wi-Fi networks, providing services at 6,112 railway stations across the country.

RailTel is a unique PSU having telecom licenses (IP-1, NLD, ISP), in-house Tier III data center services, its own security operation center and MeitY-listed cloud services. The company’s comprehensive service portfolio includes MPLS VPN, leased lines, tower co-location, data center services, cloud services, security operation center services, HD video conferencing, Aadhaar-based authentication system, e-tendering, retail broadband under the brand Railwire, IT and ICT projects, railway signaling projects and many other services.