Bengaluru, Jan 30 (IANS): Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu had remotely flagged off four express trains from here Thursday, using the telepresence service of the state-run RailTel, the ICT arm of Indian Railways, a statement said.

"The minister flagged off remotely all the four weekly trains starting from Kamakya in Assam, Patna, Tatanagar in Jharkhand and Bengaluru to Katra in Jammu and Kashmir using our Telepresence service," RailTel said in a statement Friday.

Noting that Telepresence offered a more engaging video conference with cutting-edge technology, RailTel's network, planning and marketing director A. Seshagiri Rao said the service was designed with no capital investment and obsolescence risk.

"RailTel has a PAN India MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) network and our Telepresence runs over the network," Rao added.

As a Mini Ratna enterprise, RailTel is the largest neutral telecom services provider nationwide, owning a pan-India optic fibre network, covering 70 percent of the population in towns, cities and rural areas across the country.