Kochi, Jan 20: Delta Innovative Systems, the lone satellite mail service (SMF) provider in the country, will soon make a foray into IT-enabled data providing services namely E-photo, E-voice and E-commerce. The company will shell out somewhere between Rs 20-30 crore for getting a foothold in the fast growing cyber communication service facilities.Deltagram will also link the country with 100 earthstations reaching out to over 40,000 villages as part of its core business, SMF in two years, company managing director R Kothandaraman said here. He was here in connection with the country-wide launch of Deltagram's first SMF product, Spacegram.
Launching the new product, Kothandaraman said the company planned to connect 3,000 towns and 40,000 villages over the next three years to provide speedy and efficient communication services.
The company also plans to develop nearly 1,00,000 message collection centres throughout the country. The company is proposing to set up an alternative medium of communication that is fast and economical. "Deltagram is creating a network on the earth to connect every Indian via space", he added.
The capital cost for creation of this facility will be Rs 150 crore. The company had already invested Rs 15 crore in the venture for hiring the satellite and setting up earth stations. The company proposes to raise Rs 100 crore of the capital investment from franchisee fee. The average franchisee fee will be Rs 2.5 lakh."The fee will differ from town to town", Kothandarman said.
The rest will be raised by the promoters. The company had already availed a loan of Rs 5.5 crore from the Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) for the venture, he added.
The company proposes to set up 100 earth stations in important towns of the country which will be connected through the satellite. Already 25 earth stations are in place and the rest will be set up by the end of the year.The company, having a lease line facility with Insat-2 C satellite, promises to provide such services like phone-to-phone service, phone-to-fax, fax-to- fax, e-mail-to-phone, phone-to-hand mail, hand mail-to-phone etc. The company will have 3,000 franchisees throughout the country.
In the first phase the company will be launching phone-to-phone messaging service. This enables one to send messages to any other phone anywhere in the country within 15 minutes for just Rs 10. All that the user has to do is to locally hand over the message to Deltagram and the message will reach automatically within 15 minutes.
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