NOW forms consortium for ILD services

Vineet Joshi/New Delhi

Ray says the decision to move out of undersea cabling and into ILD services was driven by business viability

Category ‘A’ ISP, Data Access, has withdrawn its Rs 600 crore ambitious plan to lay undersea cables from Singapore to Chennai. Instead, the company plans to form a consortium with international players to offer International Long Distance bandwidth services and take bandwidth on lease from players who are building such capacities.

Says Siddhartha Ray, managing director, Data Access, “The decision is all about business viability vis-a-vis the investments required to build it. It doesn’t make sense to invest in business which is already saturated. The capacity already available largely outweighs the current appetite of corporates in India. So many players are already in the process of laying terabytes of bandwidth capacity. The bandwidth available from all those i.e. Bharti-Singtel and MCI promoted SAFF is in the range of 4 terabytes with the estimated consumption at the moment a meagre 50 GB. What we plan to do is take a different route to the same business. Rather than laying undersea cables, we will hire the capacities from other players who are setting up bandwidth and sell it to corporates.”

Ray points out that the company has already formed a consortium constituting 2-3 international bandwidth and telecom carriers for providing International Long distance telephony/bandwidth services. Though the agreement has been signed and formalities completed, the company will commence services only after the government drafts its policy on Net Telephony and Voice over Internet. “Our plan is to provide International Long Distance (ILD) voice telephony services to corporates and end users. Only after the policy on Net telephony is cleared and we procure the license, we will announce concrete plans. I think this will take another 6-8 months,” says Ray. The company is yet to name the consortium. Ray declined to divulge names of the companies Data Access has collaborated with till the launch actually happens. Nonetheless, sources and industry indications point towards AT&T and BT as the likely partners in the consortium.

Apart from business benefits, the stalling of the Undersea Cable Project (UCP) is also believed to be the result of the current slowdown, which forced the company to cut investments. The mammoth Rs 600 crore investment in UCP was second initiative of the company to get the axe after shelving of its India specific expansion plans.