Customer care and service will help the ISP make inroads, Arjun said. Bharti BT Internet was just given the government clearance for ku-band gateways in seven more cities (it had the clearance for one) and it is proceeding with the investments. The Ku-Band gateway allows for faster and efficient connectivity while ensuring zero losses of packets of data. Corporate customers are important in MantraOnline's vision. The first phase of investments involve around Rs 50 crore, to provide sufficient infrastructure in the eight cities - Chennai is the fifth to be followed by Hyderabad and Calcutta. This would allow for 80 mb bandwidth.

Additional investments of Rs 100 crore are planned for the next phase, which would again be raised through equity. Excluding Madhya Pradesh, where the ISP has a presence in smaller towns, MantraOnline plans to establish a presence in 27 smaller cities having a population of more than one million.

It is also setting up cyber cafes in various metros - 20 are being targeted in Chennai. Efforts are on to begin on branding them. MantraOnline has two lines of businesses - the Internet services on one side and others such as VPN services, e-mail services, security services etc. A restructuring is on to separate the business heads, so there would be two regional managers for each region handling Internet services and other services respectively.

The service provider is expected to earn Rs 10 crore from revenues. It has a 34 per cent renewal ratio, despite the entry of free ISP providers which has had little impact. While income from Internet services would amount to 80 per cent initially and income from services to corporates 15 per cent, the ratio would change to 60 per cent from Internet services and 30 per cent from services to corporates.