Stalemate on limited mobility continues
Mumbai: The stalemate on the issue of limited mobility continues, with the Cellular Operators Association of India refusing to budge from their stand on allowing limited mobility to fixed service providers. The Association of Basic Telecom Operators, on the other hand, wants limited mobility. As a result, the first meeting between these two groups, under the aegis of the Group on Telecom and IT failed to arrive at an amicable solution.

The COAI is prepared to meet the USO (universal service obligations) for providing rural telephony, but is not willing to compromise on limited telephony.

COAI says it will roll out a rural telephony programme with fixed line tariffs of Rs 1.20 for three minutes, but this subsidised mobile service will be on condition that issues of interconnect points, terms of interconnection, and support from the USO fund are sorted out.

COAI believes that allowing limited telephony would amount to a full cellular mobile service, and is hence discriminatory.

It says that all possible benefits, including waiver of revenue share licence fees, provision of level playing field vis--vis licence entry fee for new FSPs, etc should be within the ambit of the fixed service licence structure.

The ABTO, on its part, has now left the decision to the GoT-IT.
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Enron termination notice on hold
Mumbai: Enron may not terminate MSEB services, yet. A concerted plea by Indian financial institutions at the Enron lenders meet in London being held since Monday has resulted in offshore lenders agreeing to postpone termination.

Indian FI's, led by IDBI pointed to the initiative taken by the Indian government to form a re-negotiation committee to solve the payment crisis.

Indian FIs and banks have lent out 60 per cent of the 2 billion dollar debt (of the2.9 billion dollar project) and have a 1.2 billion dollar exposure, but have no counter guarantee from the government for their exposures.

The foreign lenders too are in favour of an arbitration between the government and Enron, rather than termination.

The project has been financed by a consortium of 40 commercial banks including ANZ Grindlays, bank of America, bank of Tokyo and Citibank, while half a dozen governments including the US, Japan, Belgium, Oman and India have been involved in project financing through state owned FIs and export-import agencies.

The project envisages installing a 2184 MW power project in Dabhol in Maharashtra, of which phase I producing 740 mw of electricity is complete. This has run into a major payment tussle with the sole buyer MSEB, which claims that the cost of power is exorbitant.
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