Satyam Infoway turns today in India-First private ISP in India
Anil and all:
Well what do you know,finally!!!! If you notice Kochi is on the list,I think I may have found my ISP. Now if only TRAI and DOT or whatever just stay out of the way so the price can come down a lot cheaper,I think it will once more ISPs come on the scene.
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financialexpress.com
Sunday, November 22, 1998
Satyam Infoway steps into VSNL turf, turns ISP today
C Chitti Pantulu & Neeraj Saxena
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Hyderabad, Nov 21: Satyam Infoway Ltd will become the first private Internet service provider in the country on Sunday when the prime minister inaugurates its service at the Hi-tech City here. To be launched in the state capital initially, Satyam's service through Satyam Online Ltd will be offered in 12 other cities within a few days, covering all the major metros.
The company plans to provide leased lines, ISDN and dial-up connectivity in 25 major cities by January, way ahead of MTNL which expects to roll out in December-January in just two metros. The cities to be covered in the first phase will be Kochi, Pondicherry, Chennai, Bangalore, Mangalore, Coimbatore, Pune, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Delhi and Calcutta.
However, the Rs 40-crore company will not resort to drastic under-cutting vis-a-vis VSNL. The tariffs fixed for now will be Rs 3,600 for 100 hours and Rs 9,900 for 500 hours apart from a one-time subscription fee of Rs 300.It may be noted that Satyam Infoway was the first private sectorcompany to be awarded a category A licence. The company has an added advantage that it has a fairly large network running for corporates in the country. It has been doing the groundwork while waiting for the ISP policy to be announced for the last one and a half years and is therefore ready to move in speedily to become the first challenger to VSNL's monopoly.
Satyam has an existing 64 kbps network in most of the cities in which it was offering electronic data interchange, LotusNotes, e-mail and mail connectivity till now. This bandwidth is now being upgraded to 2 mbps and is slated to increase in line with the traffic.
Initially, the company does not propose to set up its own gateways and will use VSNL's existing gateways at Mumbai and Chennai to route traffic to its servers.Company managing director R Ramraj told The Financial Express in an exclusive interview that the company will target 1 lakh customers within the first year itself. Satyam has developed 7 sites which will be offered initially. Thedevelopment work on these sites has been done by its web services lab in Chennai over last two years. These will include IndiaUpdate.com, a news-based site for which Satyam has set up a full-fledged news bureau; Indiatalkies.com, a films-related site which is still under construction; Carnaticmusic.com, a site devoted to music where Satyam will offer live chat on the Web with pop duo Colonial Cousins this week and Carstreet.com, a site devoted to automobiles which is still under development.
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