Rajendra Kumar Bahuguna finds his job at RailTel, where he is CMD, especially satisfying because he has been with the company since its inception in 2001. At the time, there was no office, no equipment, no resources.

Of course, it was no less challenging because he was making a transition from the railways to telecom. For Bahuguna, who had worked with Indian Railways (IR) for many years in different capacities, this was a whole new game. IR was a bit of a lumbering giant. And Bahuguna had to switch from this slow behemoth to the fast moving, nimble telecom industry, which becomes more competitive every year.

The company’s website describes its mission thus: “RailTel is committed to creating a next-generation knowledge society across the country.” Today, it is a “Mini Ratna” PSU and one of India’s largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers. Its customers include telecom service providers, banks, government institutions, universities and educational institutes.

With exclusive right of way along the country’s railway tracks, the company owns a pan-Indian optical fibre cable network that reaches not just all important cities and towns but many rural areas as well. In fact, one of RailTel’s goals is to serve people who have been underserved in recent decades and bridge the digital divide.

Tracking RailTel’s growth over the years, Bahuguna says, “During the initial years of our existence, the thrust was more on creating a state-of-the-art network across India. Today, riding on the reach of our robust network, various telcos have started offering mobile services in locations that were not accessible to them earlier. However, this has limited our role more as a carriers’ carrier, offering vanilla bandwidth to operators. We aspire to move up the value chain by offering flexible VPN services along with a host of value-added services such as data centre services, cloud and telepresence, to the corporate world and enterprises.”

Commenting on the challenges before the telcos, Bahuguna says, “Today, operators are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their market share because the rules are being changed very frequently. RailTel is no exception.”

One of the challenges of the job for Bahuguna is trying to discern incipient changes. The job requires lateral thinking to survive. He is prepared to hazard only one prediction. “In the near future, we will definitely see more converged networks being built by operators. There is a fundamental shift towards providing more data-centric services including voice and video with higher throughputs,” he says.

With voice services reaching saturation point, Bahuguna expects data services to trigger the next round of growth for operators. RailTel too plans to introduce a host of value-added services.

“We have already created our first data centre at Hyderabad and are building an-other in Gurgaon. Eventually, others will come up in the major cities. On this strength, we shall launch a content delivery network particularly targeted at enterprises and government customers,” he says.

The company has launched a “Railwire” service that has been created as an open source content platform for providing broadband internet, IP telephony, e-health care, e-education and other content-driven services (gaming, video-on-demand, etc.) to the home, SOHO and SMB customer segments. It offers these services using technologies such as ADSL and fibre, or the cable operator’s infrastructure.

“The most innovative part of this business model is to encourage entrepreneurship by bringing various people/ organisations with content or network infrastructure to connect on a single platform and offer their services,” he says.

With more data-centric services being provided, prices are falling. Today, he points out, operators are required to deliver ten times the throughput at one-tenth the cost. The challenge for the industry, therefore, is to bundle and price the most useful services for users.

Before becoming CMD of RailTel, Bahuguna served as director, network planning and marketing, with the company for over four years. He was also instrumental in planning RailTel’s all-India network.

Bahuguna started his career in 1982 with the Indian Railways Service of Signal Engineers after qualifying in the Indian Engineering Service exam. Having been with the railways for several decades, he has become closely attuned to its culture and ethos. A professional signalling engineer, Bahuguna worked in signalling for 20 years before moving to the modernisation of telecom networks on the railways.

He was associated with the commissioning of the first optical fibre cable link in 1988. He can say with pride that RailTel is now one of the largest data network players in the country, specifically focused on serving the data requirements of the enterprise segment, unlike most of its competitors that target multiple market segments offering different services.

“Over the past decade, we have built unmatched expertise in delivering a high capacity network for the telecom market based on the latest available technologies, be it SDH, DWDM, MPLS or even NGN. Our technological prowess, proved over the years, has created a niche for RailTel in this segment,” he says.

The company currently has a fibre network spanning 42,000 route km. Another 10,000 route km will be added in the next year or two. Yet, as Bahuguna points out, despite all this “exhilarating” growth in network, reach, services and customers, the company has managed to remain lean, with just around 500 employees, giving it the ability to swiftly serve its customers without being hampered by the delays caused by complex hierarchies.

One of RailTel’s distinguishing features, according to Bahuguna, is its unique right of way along the railway tracks. In today’s market, where most customers depend upon multiple service providers, RailTel provides an effective end-to-end differential path, unlike other providers that have networks along the roads/highways.

The company’s successes have been recognised through numerous awards such as the Best Carrier of Carriers Award by VAR India in 2012, and the Innovation in Telecom Infrastructure Award and the T20 of Indian Telecom Award (for Bahuguna) as part of the Aegis Graham Bell Awards for 2012.

In terms of immediate plans, Bahuguna seeks to strengthen the network by transforming it into a high capacity DWDM-based network. The network architecture is also being redesigned, with smaller rings and provisioning access and core layers with multiple network paths so as to improve service.

“A major focus area is to improve our access network in the top 100 cities for which we are undertaking an extensive network roll-out so as to connect all commercial hubs in these cities,” he says. RailTel will also target all major upcoming operators and government departments for catering to their connectivity requirements.

Bahuguna is also excited about the new Telecom Centre of Excellence which RailTel recently opened as part of a tie-up with IIT Roorkee (of which he is an alumnus) and the Department of Telecommunications.

The centre will take up R&D activities in the areas of broadband and information communications technology with a view to providing affordable services to citizens, developing infrastructure, customising applications or services for specific use and developing vernacular language tools so that content can be converted into local languages. The centre will play a vital role in helping to fulfil some of the objectives enshrined in the National Telecom Policy, 2012. “One aim is to achieve 600 million broadband connections by 2020. I think we are on track,” he says.