Gas Authority of India, PowerGrid and RailTel on Friday joined hands to pool in telecom infrastructure to become India's second largest broadband service provider with plans to venture into STD and ISD services in future.
GAIL - which owns 13,000-km of optic fibre cable network, Power Grid Corp that has laid 19,000-km of cables joining 60 major cities and RailTel having networked 2,200 towns with a 27,500-km cable network, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to form a consortium for jointly offering bandwidth for e-entertainment, e-education and e-medicine.
The consortium network, which would provide connectivity to even remote North-East and Jammu and Kashmir, would be second only to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd's 400,000-km network.
"Our coming together is for offering reliable, quality and affordable services," PowerGrid chairman and managing director R P Singh said while signing the MoU.
The consortium, which would coordinate marketing and future development plans so as to get a pan-India footprint, would primarily focus on the entertainment sector and is targeting Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) revenues from the business by 2008.
"Perhaps we can get into national and international long distance (telephony) at some stage," Indian Railway's telecom arm RailTel managing director K K Bajpayee said.
GAIL chairman Proshanto Banerjee said the consortium would be given shape in the next three months and a viable business model will be worked out on the basis of revenue sharing.
The consortium aims to target the enterprise segment by providing virtual private network, broadband and managed services.
