TRAI says BSNL should share infrastructure
Kolkata: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has said that Bharat Sanchar Nigam should allow it's interconnect infrastructure to be used by other telecom operators which would help augment the number of telephone connections in the country from 150 million at present to the targeted 500 million in 2010.

Nripendra Mishra, chairman of TRAI, said all States must have interconnect exchanges. He said TRAI would interact with BSNL to persuade the latter to provide interconnect facilities to other operators and that BSNL could charge a fee for providing interconnect facilities.
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Zee to start Russian channel
Chennai: Zee Telefilms will launch a 24-hour movie channel in Russia by September this year. The channel will also telecast Indian films dubbed in Russian. Zee recently launched a 24-hour channel in Bahasa language in Indonesia, taking its international channel portfolio to 17, in addition to the 25 services it telecasts within the country.

Recently, Sony Entertainment also came on to Zee's Dish TV platform and the company expects the new Tata-Sky DTH operator to seek Zee's programming when it starts beaming from July. DishTV has one lakh subscribers in Tamil Nadu and over 1.15 million subscribers nationwide.
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Bharti Airtel plans big expansion in TN
Chennai: Bharti Airtel plans to cover all the 800 urban towns in Tamil Nadu by August this year. It also plans to increase the number of base station towers to 4,500 and cover 15,000 villages by March 2007.

The company has covered 550 urban towns and 10,000 villages so far, while it has 2,400 towers. In March 2005, Airtel had 1,000 towers and had covered 260 urban towns, 4,000 villages and had an SMS capacity of 700 messages a second.

Airtel has 1,828,546 subscribers in Tamil Nadu (Chennai and Tamil Nadu circles combined) at end 2006.
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Motorola to launch new handsets
New Delhi: Motorola has unveiled new handsets Moto Pebl in four new colours of orange, pink, blue and green besides the already existing black and red models. The handsets will be priced at Rs10,500. The company is planning to launch its new model, `Moto Rokr', before the end of the year. The company is pushing Moto Rokr as an entertainment phone that will go heavy on the music department, with MP3 downloading facilities.

Motorola India also unveiled plans to hire 500 more engineers at its research and development centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad by 2007. At present the company has 3500 engineers on its payrolls.
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Tata Steel gets go ahead for smelter in S Africa
New Delhi: Tata Steel has obtained approval to build a carbon ferrochrome smelter in South Africa from the provincial government. The multi-million rand high carbon smelter would be built in Richards Bay Town, Gabriel Ndabandaba, minister of agriculture and environmental affairs in the Kwazulu-Natal provincial government said.

There has been considerable opposition to the smelter from three community-based organisations - Richards Bay Clean Air Association, Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa and Groundwork who say the smelter would aggravate the pollution in the town.

Ndabandaba said his department had studied all the objections in detail and found that the environment would not be affected in any way.

Ndabandaba said: "I also want to encourage the social and economic benefit which the Tata plant will generate in the region."
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VPN services may get cheaper
New Delhi: The Department of Telecom has made it easier for Internet Service Providers to migrate to offering Virtual Private Network (VPN) services as a result of which prices for the service could come down in the future. According to the new guidelines issued by DoT on June 21, ISPs now have to pay Rs2.5 crore against Rs 10 crore payable earlier to the Government to take a national long distance telephone licence and start offering VPN services. VPN services, are primarily used by corporate and institutions to connect their offices across the country using a private leased line. Also according to the new guidelines if the ISPs pay Rs5 crore, they can start offering VPN services to international customers as well.

However DoT has taken out virtual private network services from the purview of the Internet Service Providers licence and has made it part of the long distance telecom services. This means that ISPs will have to necessarily take a long distance licence to offer the private network services. ISPs had been offering VPN services without paying any entry fee over the last five years. However, national long distance operators, who were also offering the same service by paying an entry fee of Rs100 crore, objected to ISPs offering VPN without paying any fee to the Government.

DoT then created a separate category VPN was allowed if the operators paid Rs10 crore as entry fee. This resulted in Asianet and Specranet withdrawing services leaving only few operators such as Sify, Hughes and HCL in the fray.
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GoAir shows interest in Air Sahara
Bangalore: Budget airline GoAir promoted by the Wadias says it would buy Air Sahara if the price is `right.' The GoAir managing director, Jeh Wadia, said, "We are open to it (acquisition) if the price is right." He did not reveal the amount the airline was willing to pay and said that as his airline has not carried out the due diligence of Air Sahara, it will not be able to talk about the price.

GoAir has been talking with a couple of domestic airlines for an interline agreement and the acquisition of Air Sahara would help it fly international routes much earlier than expected.

As per civil aviation norms, airlines can fly international routes only after completing five years of domestic operations. It will also help GoAir to get convenient time slots and access to Air Sahara's infrastructure at various airports across the country.

GoAir, which started operations seven months ago, three aircraft and plans to add eight more by October, another 18 by October 2007 and 33 by October 2008. These will be Airbus' aircraft.
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Kingfisher offers business tickets at half price
New Delhi: Kingfisher Airlines has announced a promotional scheme titled first companion to attract more business travellers. Under the scheme, the airline offers the second ticket to a business class traveller for half the original price.

A business class traveller can nominate a companion of choice and avail tickets for the companion at a 50 per cent discount, an official release said.

The offer is valid till September 30.
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Anil Ambani objects to power plant plan in Haryana SEZ
New Delhi: The Ambani brothers are at loggerheads again. This time the dispute revolves around Reliance Industries' huge special economic zone in Haryana.

The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (R-ADAG) has objected to setting up a 2000-mw power plant in the zone on the grounds that the power plant plan violates the June 2005 non-compete agreement between the two parties.

R-ADAG has written to the Board of Reliance Industries, as well and has sent off a missive to the Haryana government.

Sources in both companies said the non-compete agreement had been ratified by the Bombay High Court, as well as by group shareholders.

An official spokesperson for Reliance Industries said: "R-ADAG is also bidding for oil and gas blocks, and that is a business meant for Reliance Industries."

In response to allegations of the SEZ plans violating the brothers' non-compete pact, the spokesperson said, "RIL has always fulfilled all its commitments and obligations. It will follow the same principles in the future as well."

The spokesperson said, "This is not a Reliance project alone - the Haryana government is an equity stake-holder in the project (10 per cent through the Haryana State Industrial Development Corporation). If they (R-ADAG) choose to interpret it this way, we too can have our interpretations," they said.
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Nalco workers strike: protest against divestment
Bhubaneshwar: Aluminium production at public sector Nalco's plant at Angul in Orissa stopped on Friday, as employees struck work demanding that the Centre drop a decision to sell 10 per cent stake in the company.

"The token strike is a warning to the government to go back on its decision. If the government does not relent, it will lead to a long drawn confrontation," Nalco Employees Federation of India president Shivaji Patnaik said.

The strike by workers followed the Union Cabinet's decision on Thursdayto divest 10 per cent of its stake in the aluminium major.

While Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has asked the government to think twice before selling its stake, CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury said the Left parties would meet in New Delhi soon to devise a plan to counter the government's decision.

The NDA government had divested 13 per cent stake in the company. Even if the proposed 10 per cent divestment takes place, government's holding in Nalco would be 77.15 per cent.

The Centre on Thursday announced that 10 per cent stake each in Nalco and Neyveli Lignite Corporation would be divested to raise Rs2500 crore and that the decision had been taken as per the consensus reached with the Left parties in November.
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