Choto Cheeta Online

BSNL revolutionized the Indian approached to Internet by introducing DataOne service via ADSL technology. It is seen to many as revolution because of the area covered by BSNL. BSNL happened to be the largest PSTN service provider of India by virtually having RJ-11 telephone wire every where in the county. Hence they were able to make broadband available to every one, even for the person leaving at remotest corners of the country.

Now it seems the Indian Railway is coming to the party. Indian Railway happen to have one of the largest OCF network of the country. Up till recently, Indian Railway decided that as because, much of their bandwidth is not been utilized hence to generate more revenue they shall offer end user Internet solutions.

They have successfully tested end user domestic and corporate services at Bangalore and presently operating 250 large state of the art Cyber Cafes in 250 major stations of 83 cities nation wide. They are presently under process to deploy Wifi at 500 major railway stations nation wide and to provide wireless Internet at all important trains (Rajdhani / Shatabdi / Jan Shatabdi express).

What makes this news interesting that while replying to ChotoCheeta.com, Indian Railway end user service support (Railwire.in) have said that they would be now moving to second phase in which Kolkata as one of the city would have end user ISP solution from Railtel.in under their PAN-India roll out plan.

Kolkata will come under our pan-India rollout plans. From the customer support team we at present do not have good visibility into the exact dates and timelines. However, you could expect us to reach Kolkata by end of this year or early next year.

Indian Railways have a total of 50,000 KM (as of Feb, 2007) of optic fiber network. Virtually where ever they have broadgage lines, they have their OFC running beside it. Hence this allows them to provide some really attractive rates. Bandwidth ranging from 256kbps to 155 mbps. Certainly this can be a really good alternate to any of the present running ISP, major players like BSNL (DataOne Broadband) / MTNL / Reliance / Sify / TATAIndicom).

Railwire.in end user ISP tariff for unlimited data uses,

256 Kbps Rs. 320
512 Kbps Rs. 620
1 Mbps Rs. 920
2 Mbps Rs. 1220
4 Mbps Rs. 2120
8 Mbps Rs. 3620
16 Mbps Rs. 6920
32 Mbps Rs. 13520

Therefore the wait begins for the RailTel service !!!