Juniper Network bags RailTel contract

India's RailTel Corporation has selected Juniper Networks' M-series routers, to help provide secure internet connections to customers of the Indian Railways, a company release said.

RailTel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of India's Ministry of Railways, was established in September 2000 as a public sector undertaking to exploit commercial use of state-owned railway communication infrastructure.

Juniper's routers on its network would help RailTel offer various value added services to its customers, the release said.

Routers are devices that forward electronic traffic between and among networks, using information from the networks and from 'routing tables' on where to send which data.

Juniper will install its routers on RailTel's network in 38 cities. This will "enable RailTel to compete with some of India's largest carriers in providing advanced telecommunications services that go beyond simple broadband access," the release said.

RailTel operates an Optical Fibre Cable (OFC) network with national coverage. The network includes some 25,000 kilometres of cabling, and RailTel planned to increase it to 40,000 kilometres in four years. RailTel's points of presence will touch some 4,000 railway stations by 2008, providing secure Internet connections to railway customers.

It had grown by innovating its services to meet the needs of the market: Along with selling pure bandwidth RailTel was now making its presence felt in areas like virtual private networks that allow users to log into their home networks from computers anywhere.