TATA Group company VSNL has dropped its international bandwidth products—International Private Leased Circuits (IPLC) and Internet Leased Lines (ILL) — prices by 40 per cent, paving the way for lower costs for call centres and other user industries. VSNL said from September 1, its IPLC prices will fall by a quarter and ILL tariffs by up to 40%. These products are offered in India using VSNL’s global network that spans over 200,000 route kilometres, with 275 PoPs, connecting 200 countries.“We have invested over Rs 2,500 crore in expanding our global presence and connectivity in the last two years. We have regularly passed on the benefits of improved cost efficiencies and service quality to our customers,” said N Srinath, Executive Director, VSNL.The company said the price reduction is part of the Tata Group’s initiative to support and encourage the globalisation of India Inc. Demand for international connectivity has been rapidly growing with several Indian companies, led by Tata Group enterprises, investing overseas and India emerging as a favourite destination for FDI and FII inflows. International connectivity is also an important driver for the growth of the fast-growing infotech, BPO and KPO sectors. The market for international and internet bandwidth is expected to expand as the reduced prices will encourage demand from new customer segments like SMEs, smaller ISPs and academic institutions.VSNL also announced its intention, in partnership with leading carriers in the respective regions, to build two new submarine cable systems, one between India and Europe and the other intra-Asia. It would invest $600 million to build the two cable systems.These multi-terabit capacity systems, incorporating state of the art technologies, would interconnect with VSNL’s existing global network that has over 20 terabits of capacity. The India-Europe cable would also provide connectivity to the Gulf region and the African continent, and supplement VSNL’s existing bandwidth capacity in several consortium cables in the region.IPLCs are point to point, international private circuits, mainly used by large Indian corporates and multinationals to connect to their regional andglobal locations. Internet leased lines are dedicated high speed connectionsto access the Internet, used by enterprises and small/medium ISPs.VSNL has emerged as the one of the world’s largest owners of undersea cable bandwidth, after the acquisition of Tyco Global Network (TGN) last year.Tata to invest $25.8 bnMUMBAI: Tata Group plans to invest Rs 120,000 crore ($25.8 billion) in the next three to five years in telecommunications, steel, chemicals, power and other industries, a group official said on Thursday. “These are the areas in which we believe the companies can contribute value for money for its customers and investors across the sectors,” Kishore Chaukar, a director at the group’s holding company, Tata Sons, said.
