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Syngal makes a case for monopolies

He was addressing the US-India Telecommunication Conference, organised jointly by the US Trade and Development Agency and the Confederation of Indian Industries here.

T O D A Y

• Die Hard: VSNL lives! • Divestment delayed • Low TAR promise • The Alcatel plan

"Before throwing a sector open for private participation we should wait till our own companies are financially strong enough to face competition," Syngal said.

Monopolies of the government companies in other countries around the world were broken only when the domestic organisations were strong enough to take on the competition, he added.

Reacting to the comments on the inability of VSNL to provide the required bandwidth for Internet service providers, Syngal said VSNL has no problem, whatsoever, regarding bandwidth.

"The notion that VSNL does not have the capability to provide bandwidth is not correct. In fact, we can provide bandwidth on demand."

Syngal also assured that VSNL has enough capabilities to support growth in the domestic telecom services. He said that the company currently has a capacity of terminating 30,000 calls out of which only 17,000-call capacity is being used. Moreover, the company is also planning to add another 15,000 call-termination capacity soon.

Reacting to the high tariff charged by VSNL for Internet access, Syngal said VSNL pays $25,000 per month to US carriers for 2 megabit Internet access while the private ISPs get the same access for only $3,000 per month.

In another session of the conference, MTNL Chairman and Managing Director S Rajgopalan invited the US telecom companies to participate in the tenders to be floated by MTNL for procuring the equipment to meet its requirement.

"MTNL is planning to invest Rs 20 billion for expansion and upgrading of its network to make it a world-class service provider and we would like to make the US companies our partner in achieving this."

Rajgopalan also indicated that the MTNL is seriously considering entering the paging and cellular services industry. He said that the company is looking hard at these value-added services.

The Rs 10 billion freedom

Die Hard: VSNL lives!

- Compiled from the Indian media

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