VSNL has come out with standard access facilitation charges for its submarine cable landing stations in Mumbai, Chennai and Ernakulam, becoming the first international long distance (ILD) operator to do so.
It is also setting up facilitation rooms in these three cities to consolidate its access and interconnection facilities.
ILDOs and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who buy bandwidth from various cable companies in landing centers, pay access facilitation charges.
VSNL will take standard access facilitation charges for connecting ILDOs and ISPs, which buy bandwidth from cable companies landing in the three cities. The charges will provide Indian operators better access, lower costs, improved security and efficient support.
Modeled on international benchmarks, VSNL's terms will enable Indian operators to be connected to cable capacities at the company's landing stations in about 15 days from the date of signing an access facilitation agreement.
Besides VSNL, Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel also operate with submarine cable operations. There are eight submarine cable lands in India, with over 18 terabits of design capacity and over 1 terabit (1000,000 Mbps) of its available capacity.
At least five other cable systems are likely to land in India in the next few years.
