Banerjee in New Delhi on Thursday. A Telegraph picture

New Delhi, July 29: Gail (India) Ltd plans to become a major player in the telecom infrastructure network with a Rs 750-crore investment. The expansion of Gail’s telecom business is expected to bring down the cost of broadband connectivity and increase value-added services for telecom users at home.

Gail plans to bring optical fibre-to-home in 23 cities that will provide the end-customer a high-speed internet connection and also convergence of services like cable connection and telephone connection using one wire. It will be the second company after Reliance Infocomm to offer fibre-to-home. Gail will lay a fibre optic cable network of about 20,000 km covering 150 cities over the next five years.

While the company is not averse to entering the telecom sector as a full-fledged operator, it has no immediate plans to enter the services sector with a unified access service licence.

Gail’s chairman and managing director P. Banerjee said, “The telecom business of Gail is in the ‘take-off’ stage. The GailTel Grid will be an extensive telecom network to be built along the gas pipeline network for captive use, but the surplus capacity has also been commercially exploited. We have made a good beginning in sale of bandwidth.”

The telecom grid will be part of a national gas grid to be created across the country. “Our city gas pipeline distribution network would enable us to further penetrate the market and help us achieve the last mile connectivity,” said Banerjee. GailTel offers bandwidth capacity to telecom companies like Bharti Infotel, Hutch, Escotel, Tata Teleservices, Data Access, Videsh Sanchar Nigam and also Software and Technology Parks of India.

Gail is optimistic about the telecom business. Its bandwidth sales during 2003-04 increased 75 per cent at Rs 20.5 crore against Rs 11.71 crore during 2002-03. It sold 1230 megabits per second of bandwidth during 2003-04 against 482 mbps last year.

“We plan to invest more than Rs 750 crore in the telecom infrastructure business over the next five years. It will be focused on leveraging strategic advantage and long-term contracts with large bandwidth users, improving capabilities in marketing, customer service and quality, creating redundancy and reliability, to take fibre-to-home,” said Banerjee.