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VSNL to set up STM links in high traffic areas

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

NEW DELHI: Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL) plans to set up STM-1 connections in the high traffic zones in the country. An STM-1 link has 155 Mbps of capacity. The first link to be targeted is the Mumbai-Pune circle that is expected to be ready within the next three months. Director, Operations Amitabh Kumar said, "We plan to create the connectivity in high density traffic regions initially and later expand to other pockets. Therefore, initially, we shall set up the STM links within the regions and later expand to include other pockets too." In the north, the link will be between Mumbai and Delhi and later extended to Kanpur, Allahabad and Chandigarh. In the South, the link would first be set up between Chennai and Hyderabad and Bangalore and later expanded to include Ernakulum and Thiruvananthapuram. The Western circle is later expected to include Goa as well.



VSNL’s initiative is significant in light of the bandwidth crunch that the country is faced with particularly on the domestic front. Experts have been mooting the idea of developing connectivity in high-density traffic areas, similar to the situations in China. In China, there are pockets like Shanghai and Taiwan which are very well connected and where there is a huge volume of economic activity taking place and experts have been favoring a replication of the model in the country.



Speaking on the sidelines of the seminar at IIW, Kumar also said that VSNL was seriously looking at its hosting services. It already has a 100,000 square feet facility at Prabhadevi in Mumabi and has now taken up space in Delhi to expand the capacity.



It already co-hosts round 300-400 sites and it is possible that the hosting services form a major source of the company’s revenues within the next couple of years. Some of the sites hosted on VSNL servers include Rediff, Yahoo and NSE.



Delivering a presentation on the services that ISPs can explore in India, Kumar said that the major traffic drivers would be real-time audio and video streaming, e-commerce, especially where goods can be delivered online like e-books and music, and Internet telephony as and when it is opened in India. He believed that it was important for ISPs to focus on these services if it wanted to remain competitive in revenue generation.



Kumar said that it was not economically viable to have peering services among Indian ISPs since none of them have enough traffic. Peering is a practice by which ISPs share traffic amongst themselves by diverting traffic with their partners. It is only when ISPs have about five million customers that such services can take place.

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