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Star Alliance looking for Indian partners
Sydney: Star Alliance said it is in talks with Air India Ltd, Jet Airways India Ltd and Sahara Airlines Ltd to get one of them to join the world's largest group of airlines. The move will extending the alliance's network to the second-most populous nation in the world.

Joining Star Alliance would give a carrier access to more than 15,000 connecting flights a day run by other carriers flying to 840 destinations in 150 countries. Airline alliances help increase sales and reduce costs by feeding passengers onto other networks, sharing common facilities and making joint purchases.

Falling ticket prices and India's surging economy are encouraging more people to fly rather than taking government-operated trains.

Alliance officials have indicated that an agreement may be reached "rather quickly". They also said that China, Russia, India are its main target countries.
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VSNL requests BSNL to reconsider India-Singapore cable plan
New Delhi: Leading international long distance service provider VSNL has offered to provide bulk fibre cable capacity to BSNL, in a move to "allow best possible use of government's resources and avoid duplication of infrastructure creation".

VSNL has already started a dialogue with BSNL in this regard last week. It said that the BSNL cable will become the sixth cable on the India-Singapore route, making it increasingly difficult for the state-owned company to get a payback on its investments.

Last month, telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran had announced that BSNL had undertaken the work of laying an undersea cable from Chennai to Sri Lanka and to connect Andaman and Nicobar to Singapore.

In a letter to BSNL, VSNL has opened doors to a dialogue on mutually acceptable commercial terms to state owned BSNL stating government of India holds a 26 per cent stake in VSNL while BSNL is fully owned by the government.

While VSNL spokesperson confirmed that the company has initiated a dialogue with BSNL, he declined to comment on the ongoing discussions between the two companies on a IRU(Indeferable Right of Use) basis or sale of fiber pair to BSNL, VSNL has also offered to connect Andamans through a branching unit on its Tata Indicom India Singapore cable system in order to connect the Andamans with the mainland.
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BSNL to slash broadband tariffs by half
Hyderabad: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd chairman and managing director of BSNL, A.K. Sinha, on Monday said that BSNL would lower its broadband tariffs from the current Rs500 a month to about Rs250-300 a month. With the move it intends to lure its dial-up Internet users towards broadband.

"Following this move, we expect to add about 1 million broadband connections this year and about 2 million more next. About 1.8 million dial-up Internet connection users would be attracted to come over to the broadband network for enhanced browsing experience," he said.

Addressing a press conference here after handing over Sanchar Awards, Sinha said that the corporation has earmarked Rs20,000-crore towards capital expenditure this fiscal, which would be invested in the expansion of the GSM network, customer service, Internet backbone and landlines that would mostly be wireless.

About Rs1,000 crore was also being deployed into customer care-related services.

Sinha said from the current 1.07-crore subscribers, the company expects to add about two crore to the BSNL network by the end of this fiscal.
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Bharti signs Rs.1000 crore outsourcing contract with BPOs
New Delhi: Bharti Tele-Ventures on Monday has announced a Rs1,000-crore deal to outsource all its call centre operations over the next four-five years to four leading BPOs - Hinduja TMT, IBM Daksh, Mphasis and TeleTech Services.

It has also announced a landmark technology outsourcing arrangement with Nortel, wherein the latter would provide technology and expert resources required to provide customer-care services to its customers via voice, advanced speech recognition, multimedia contact centre, unified messaging, computer-telephony integration and IP enabled video communications to the respective customer service partners.

Bharti Tele-Ventures, is India's leading GSM mobile service provider and has a presence in all the 23 telecom circles in the country. The company has a subscriber base of 12 million.

According to him, the call centre operations would be geographically split among the four BPOs. While TeleTech and Mphasis would handle the National Capital Region, IBM Daksh the Pune, Chandigarh and Kolkata regions, Mphasis would look after Bangalore and Hyderabad and Hinduja TMT would take of the Chennai region.

The centres would start functioning within next 2-3 months with 6,000 initial seats, which will be expanded later. Company executives said that their current call centres, which have also been outsourced, would be integrated with these BPOs. However, AirTel Care-Touch customers (high-end subscribers) would continue to be under Bharti's 15,000-seater call centre.
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Equity firm 3i picks up 35 per cent stake in Nimbus Communications
London: London-based private equity firm 3i plc said on Monday that it has made its first investment in India with a $45mn stake in Mumbai-based sports and media company Nimbus Communications.

The $45 million investment gives 3i a share of roughly 35% in Nimbus Communications, according to media reports.

Nimbus Communications has four lines of business: television programming and sports coverage, both of which are established businesses in India, and two newer units - motion picture production and the mobile content services.

Anil Ahuja, managing director and co-head of 3i's India business said Nimbus Communications is "well positioned to achieve its goal of becoming a billion-dollar company by 2010." The company's capitalized billings for the year ending March 2005 was $50 million, Ahuja said.

Nimbus's Singapore-based subsidiary Nimbus Sport International Pte. Ltd., a sports marketing and production, manages a number of major sports contracts, including the commercial rights for International Cricket Council events mandated by the Global Cricket Corp.

The company's television business broadcasts 15 television serials a week in India, nine of which are produced by Nimbus itself. Nimbus's nascent motion picture business is taking over an Indian film distribution company, Nimbus said, but gave no further details.

The company's Nimbus Mobile business - which provides mobile content services - is currently developing city guides, embedded movie and sports content and a mobile sports video portal.

3i said the $45 million investment will finance the acquisition of sports rights, develop global sports events, finance investments in television production and infrastructure expansion, fund Indian language and international film production, Indian language film distribution, mobile content distribution, and develop additional digital content production for wireless and video platforms.
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RIL strikes gas in coal-beds of Madhya Pradesh
New Delhi: Reliance Industries has struck a huge gas reserve, in the coal beds of the Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh. This will be the private sector oil company's first on-land strike.

The Mukesh Ambani-run company had earlier announced that it had struck the country's biggest gas reserve of over 14 trillion cubic feet (tcf) in a exploration block off the Andhra coast.

In Madhya Pradesh, RIL has found 3.75 tcf of gas reserves under coal seams in the Sohagpur west and east coal bed methane exploration blocks (CBM) in Shahdol district.
The Directorate-General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) has certified the gas reserves. According to DGH an estimated 49 billion cubic feet of gas reserves are available in Sohagpur (East) and 36.82 bcf in Sohagpur (West).

ONGC had earlier ensured continuous flow of gas from an experimental well in the coal fields of Jharia in Jharkhand and Essar too reported some gas find in West Bengal's Raniganj coal belt.

Gas trapped in coal layers primarily consists of methane (80-95%) and was earlier going waste and causing explosions during coalmining operations.
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Tata Indicom and Nokia launch handset range
Mumbai: Tata Teleservices, India's leading telecom service provider, partnering with Nokia, one of the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers, has announced the launch of an exciting range of Tata Indicom-Nokia mobile handsets for its customers.

The new Tata Indicom-Nokia mobile phones are versatile, feature rich, and cater to all categories of customers. So, from a versatile higher end mobile to an equally exciting, cost effective mobile phone, Tata Indicom customers from every walk of life stand to benefit from this unique partnership.

The host of Nokia models that Tata Indicom offers include Nokia 2112, Nokia 2280, Nokia 3205, Nokia 6585, Nokia 3105, and Nokia 6225, priced in the affordable range of around Rs3000-Rs8000.

The Nokia models that Tata Indicom has added to its ever-appealing bouquet also include the new Nokia 6255 priced in the range of Rs13000.
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