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Government okays Bharti Telesonic's long distance foray

Telecoms company Bharti Telesonic said on Wednesday it had secured a letter of intent from the government to operate long distance telephone services.

The firm, a joint venture between leading telecoms group Bharti Enterprises and Singapore Telecom, is the second company to get a letter of intent to offer long distance services.

The government, which opened up the long distance telephone business to private competition last year, has so far given preliminary approval only to the Reliance group.

Bharti Telesonic, 90 per cent owned by Bharti Televentures, a Bharti group holding company and the rest by SingTel, is rolling out a nationwide optic fibre backbone network spanning 35,000 km to offer data, voice and video services.

"The national long distance services will be initially available in 65 major cities, progressively extended to 120 cities by the end of the current financial year (April-March)," the firm said in a statement.

It plans to extend the network to 200 cities by the end of fiscal year 2002-03.

The firm said it would offer high bandwidth connectivity to large carriers and enterprises on its gigabit nationwide, flexible and multi-technology backbone.

"Bharti Telesonic is laying a 48-fibre network of 40 GBPS (gigabit per second) capacity to deliver high-speed multi-point links which will meet customers' requirements both today and into the future," it said.

Bharti and its much bigger rival, the Reliance group which includes petrochemicals firm Reliance Industries Ltd and refining giant Reliance Petroleum Ltd, are the only two private firms to seriously plod ahead in the long distance business, dominated so far by state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.

Reliance, through a group company, Reliance Infocom is building a 60,000-km broadband network covering 115 cities at a cost of Rs 250 billion.

Another joint venture between the Bharti group and SingTel, Network i2i, is laying an undersea cable connecting Bombay and Madras with Singapore.

The unlisted Bharti group has a strong presence in the cellular telephony business along with small interests in fixed line telephony, Internet access and equipment-making businesses.

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