Bowing to pressure from within the government, the MTNL board of directors which met here on Friday, decided to drop the idea of a 30 per cent cut at the last moment. The company has undercut the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd tariff by 15 per cent for the present.

Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) chairman and managing director S Rajagopalan told newspersons that, "this tariff is only valid for a three-month period and will be reduced later".

The company will do a `soft launch' of the service on February 2, followed by the commercial launch on February 9. The tariff for the service will be in addition to local call charges.

MTNL will offer 5,000 connections each in Delhi and Mumbai to start with, followed by further increase to 20,000 connections by April, 1999. The company is aiming for 1,00,000connections by the end of this calendar year, said Rajagopalan, adding that the problem of access would be resolved as MTNL will provide 1:10 ratio, with 480 ports each in Delhi and Mumbai.

MTNL will also offer interconnection at 4 Mbps, with a dynamic re-routing facility. The connection will be at a speed of 28.8 kbps, necessitating a separate modem in order to benefit from this high-speed service.

For the ISDN dial up service at 64 kbps, MTNL will charge Rs 4,675 for 100 hours, Rs 10,625 for 250 hours and Rs 16,150 for 500 hours. In the case of a 128 kbps connection, the company proposes to charge Rs 9,350 for 100 hours, Rs 21,250 for 250 hours and Rs 32,300 for 500 hours.

MTNL has also launched a number of new intelligent network (IN) services including a televoting service for television opinion polls and an account card calling aimed at travelling executives and corporates.

Net profit rises 25%
Mahanagar Telephone Nigam has posted a 25 per cent increase in net profits to Rs 340.54 crorein the third quarter of the current financial year. The company has registered a net profit of Rs 272.19 crore during October-December 1998, according to a company release. Total revenue of the company during the quarter, has increased by 10.67 per cent to Rs 1306.88 crore compared to Rs 1180.84 crore during October-December 1997. MTNL has also recorded a 161.27 per cent increase in other income to Rs 55.99 crore from Rs 21.43, in the quarter as against the third quarter of 1997.