The company has presently three switches at Navi Mumbai, Worli, and Pune. Plans are to cover 2,20,000 lines in couple of years and over five million lines in the next 15 years.

Tata Teleservices Ltd

Tata Teleservices Ltd launched its services on 31 March 1999 and has 35,000 subscribers at present. The company started its services in Hyderabad and then followed it up in Vijaywada. To meet the initial rollout commitments of 50,000 lines in the first year of operation, it has gone for Wireless in Local Loop (WILL) based on CDMA technology.

The company is presently offering services like alarm service, STD locking to call management features such as call waiting, three-way conference, call forwarding, CLI, Centrex, ISDN, leased-lines, and E1s. It is planning to launch voicemail, PBX with DID, and toll-free lines in the coming months.

Others

Reliance Telecom has started its service in a limited way in Jamnagar. Shyam Telelink has recently started services at Jaipur and Jodhpur. Even Essar Comvision will start its services in Punjab by the end of this fiscal. In the Haryana circle, the DoT is in legal tangle with HFCL. In the rest of the state circles, there would be a re-tendering and the entire process should be over by the end of this fiscal. And logically it should happen before the Domestic Long Distance (DLD) policy is announced.

The report of the Committee on Rural Communication, set up in November 1999, was presented to the communications minister recently. The committee was established to look into the problems of development and operation of rural telecom services, especially VPTs, technology options, material requirement, etc. The major recommendations of the committee are:

• WILL for rural telecom with a range of about 25 km to be inducted throughout the country. Speed up the procurement process of WILL equipment.

• Suitable systems for satellite terminals to be selected and procured at the earliest.

• New VPTs should have STD facility and the existing VPTs to be upgraded for the same.

• Faulty MARR systems to be repaired and unserviceable systems to be replaced. Status report to be obtained within two months.

• DTS should facilitate so that VPTs are upgraded to Public Tele Information Centres/Information Dhabas progressively.

The Government has now given 15 August 2001 as the deadline for providing VPTs in all the villages of India. To make basic services accessible to the common man in the remotest parts of India and to meet the targets on the tele-density front, the contributions of private operators will be important.