The Hindu Business Line : Share leased lines on demand basis: TRAI

Boosting competition
Customers must have ability to choose preferred leased circuit service provider
Service providers must meet other providers’ request in terms of local lead

Our Bureau

New Delhi, Sept. 14 In a bid to make the domestic bandwidth market more competitive, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has asked all the telecom operators to give access to their fixed line optical fibre cable and copper network to each other in a non-discriminatory basis.

The move will benefit new players such as Sify, Tulip IT and also small Internet Service Providers who will now be able to lease capacity from larger telecom operators at market driven price.

TRAI’s regulation was necessitated after some of the larger telecom operators such as BSNL was giving bandwidth to other operators at their own terms.

Hinders growth

BSNL has the largest domestic cable network in the country and its refusal to give bandwidth based on demand was hampering the growth of this sector.

While TRAI has not made any regulation specifically for BSNL, it said that all the operators should give bandwidth within 30 days of another operator making a request.

“New entrants generally find it difficult to compete in domestic leased line market because of non-availability of parts of DLC (domestic leased circuits), specially the access part. The Authority is of the view that customers should have the ability to choose their preferred service provider of DLC without artificial and anti competitive constraint limiting their choices as they are able to do in other segments of the telecom sector. In view of the above, the Authority is of the opinion that service providers shall meet other service providers’ request for a complete DLC or access in terms of local lead, since denial of such request by the service provider or adduction of unreasonable terms and conditions having a similar effect, would hinder the emergence of a competitive market,” TRAI said.

Application areas

Leased lines are normally used by businesses that need high quality interconnection, with Service Level Agreement, between geographically separated offices to run critical applications with fast upstream/downstream speeds or access to the Internet.

For example, remote workers accessing office-based applications will be retrieving rich multimedia data from their office databases that would require high downstream bandwidth.

Knowledge Process Outsourcing companies and businesses providing valued-added services might require high upstream bandwidth to upload large volumes of data.

As per TRAI’s estimates, domestic leased line market is expected to touch Rs 3,000 crore by 2008 and Rs 4,500 crore by 2010.

More Stories on : Broadband | Telecommunications | Regulatory Bodies & Rulings

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page