Railtel Corporation of India Ltd (RCIL) was established in September 2000 as a Public Sector Undertaking. The Company is promoted by and is in administrative control of Ministry of Railways. It is a 100% subsidiary of Ministry of Railways. It was set up mainly to utilise the Railway's communication assets lying idely and to modernize the existing infrastructure for providing communication facilities for Railways and for commercial purposes.
RailTel Corporation a 'Mini Ratna (Category-I)' PSU is one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers in the country owning a Pan-India optic fibre network on exclusive Right of Way (ROW) along Railway track. The OFC network covers all important towns & cities of the country and several rural areas covering 70% of India's population. RailTel is in the forefront in providing nationwide Broadband Telecom & Multimedia Network in all parts of the country in addition to modernization of Train operations and administration network systems.
Apart from these, RCILis providing services in Bandwidth at various granularities, secure and protected OFC Path, 24 strand single mode fibre armoured OFC, Network Engineered for SDH, Edge & access layer by STM1/4,Network enabled for IP, ATM, frame delay, Giganet Ethernet and seamless connectivity.
During 2003 the first high speed long distance OFC network connecting three important points in south viz Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad and covering a length of 1957 kms and thereafter 192 kms in Mumbai - Pune and 309 kms in New Delhi - Jaipur Sections, presently it is covering 93 important cities.It has also commissioned first Cyber Cafe on Railway Platform in New Delhi.
In 2003-04, OFC works system was commissioned since the formation of RailTel. 14750 Route Kms of OFC system were added till June, 2004. In addition to this, STM-1/4 (155/622 MBPS) System was commissioned on 15319 Route KMs till June, 2004.
During the year 2012-13, the core network of RailTel was extended by further 1077 RKMs of OFC leading to a total length of 42099 RKMs by the end of the year.
During the year 2015, Company commissioned its second Data Center at Gurgaon. It launched various new services during the year such as Data center & DR services, Tele-presence as a service. It took up the initiative of providing Wi-Fi services at Railway stations. RailTel incorporated a wholly owned subsidiary Company on 12th August, 2014 by the name 'RailTel Enterprises Limited' (REL). It provided Wi-Fi facility at A1 & A category stations comprising of about 400 stations in the country. It commissioned Wi-Fi facility at Bangalore, New Delhi, Chennai, &Goa.
During the year 2015-16, RailTel launched a project to provide Wi-Fi service at 400 stations in country. Railwire' the retail broadband model was launched and in March 2015, and Mumbai Central Station became the first station to provide Wi-Fi services to its commuters. It started a pilot of this project with two firms across five stations each on Mumbai - Ahmedabad and Allahabad - Manikpur sections.
In 2016-17, RailTel upgraded the Mumbai- Chennai DWDM path on 100G capacity on single channel making it one of the few operators in the country to have such network. On top of this network, it upgraded its MPLS network to provide n x 10G capacities on backbone with access routers having multiple of 2.5G/1G capacity. It commissioned 110 stations by Dec'16. By March 2017, it launched Wi-Fi services at 115 stations.
RailTel commissioned Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAMS) on existing Railway exchanges to provide Broadband services in 2021-22. Work of Electronic Interlocking at 09 stations commissioned in 2022-23.