GAILTEL, the telecom service arm of GAIL (India) Limited (GAIL), is expanding its presence in the Indian telecom sector having commenced its commercial operation in June 2001, the company has currently established a high speed optical fiber network, offering highly dependable bandwidth for telecom service providers. The network extends to around 13,000 km, connecting around 200 cities across various states like Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharastra, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.

With synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) as the core layer, the network is built largely along the highly secured GAIL's cross country pipeline corridor and also configured in self-healing rings to ensure highly reliable and error free service to its customers. The network is managed centrally on round-the-clock basis from a state-of-art Network Management Center at Noida.

The company currently offers its services in the two areas of bandwidth leasing & infrastructure leasing.

Bandwidth leasing: GAILTEL has established its points of presences in more than 200 cities through state-of-the-art optical fiber network supporting self-healing survivable architecture and mostly passing along the highly secure gas pipelines across the country.

For connectivity between any two customer locations GAILTEL offers clear channel scalable TDM bandwidth in nxE-1, DS-3, STM-1, STM-4 and STM-16 levels having key features such as managed end-to-end connectivity including local leads and service level agreement based service, round the clock help desk, and on-site maintenance support.

Infrastructure leasing: GAILTEL leases out dark fiber, towers, and co-location facilities across the country, under IP-I license. The company has wide spread towers and co-location facilities along GAIL's cross-country pipeline, reaching some of the remotest villages of our country. Numerous telecommunication service providers use this infrastructure for the speedy roll-out of their services apart from reducing their capex.

National long distance (NLD) service: With acquiring the NLD license, GAILTEL intends to aggressively market the inter-circle traffic of the cellular operators. Apart from catering to telco's inter-circle traffic, GAILTEL also intends to meet the connectivity requirement of corporate houses Government Organization through leased lines and VPN solutions. The highly secure optical fiber communication (OFC) network of GAILTEL will be the obvious choice of corporate and telecom operators for their mission critical connectivity.

The company envisions expanding telecom infrastructure in synergy with the expansion of GAIL's cross-country pipeline network while significantly contributing to realization of goals and objectives of National Telecom Policy, 1999. The company's efforts are also focusing on its goals to become a dominant and preferred telecom service provider in the area of operation and to provide and maintain state-of-art communication facilities for smooth operation, control, and safety of GAIL's cross-country pipeline infrastructure.

The future plans of the company includes, cooperation with RailTel & POWERTEL in telecom sector for jointly addressing the telecom market, offering better benefits to the customers in terms of higher reliability and reach. Acquiring NLD license shortly for addressing the inter circle cellular traffic as well as Enterprise segment, creating highly reliable OFC based city access network (FTTC, FTTH etc) in association with GAIL's JV partners like IGL/BGL/MGL/CUGL along the city gas pipeline network, are also among the priorities of the company.