The Hindu Business Line : GAILTEL plans to expand network

DESPITE losing a major customer in VSNL, GAILTEL (the telecom services arm of GAIL (India) Ltd) has clocked a turnover of Rs 18.92 crore for the year ended March 2005 and is upbeat about its ongoing expansion plans.

The company plans to expand its network to Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, and West Bengal.

Currently, the States covered are Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, and Andhra Pradesh.

In the long run the company plans to expand the network from 8,000 km to 18,000 km.

Operating as an integrated telecom infrastructure provider, the network has initially taken shape along GAIL's 7,000-km-long pipeline infrastructure.

With 8,500 km of optical fibre network already operational at 99.7 per cent availability, the company is looking at tapping the rest of the market.

The cities to be covered are Mangalore, Bangalore, Kochi, Madurai, Coimbatore, Tiruchi, Chennai, Dabhol, Vijaywada, Kakinada, Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, Jamshedpur, Bilaspur, Raipur, Nagpur, Phoolpur, Allahabad, Gaya, Patna, Bokaro, Ranchi, and Kolkata.

The company's telecom service arm provides both telecommunications services and commercial bandwidth services to customers.

The GAILTEL network first became operational along the Delhi-Mumbai route with its network extending to over 8,000 km of OFC network connecting 73 cities based on dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) technology.

This network encompasses major commercial centres in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Chandigarh, and Delhi.

Today, GAILTEL's North-West-Central network corridor accounts for 65 per cent of India's long-distance traffic.

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