What is your present subscriber base? And what is the projected growth inthe next five years?
At present, we are operating in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Pune with about22,000 lines. We have various domestic and international corporations as ourcustomer. By the year 2005, we expect to provide seven lakhs lines acrossthe state of Maharashtra and Goa, with a projected revenue turnover of aboutRs 2000 crore.

What is the company's business strategy to achieve such high growth inthe next five years?
Our fundamental business strategy is to capture significant market share andrevenues by delivering an array of high quality services to a targeted groupof high usage customers. We will construct, operate and maintainstate-of-the-art Net-centric infrastructure with world class advanceservices. Moreover, we are looking at moving up the value chain. We willsoon launch Internet access services with our own international gateway. Andfurther move on to provide application services like data centers, VPN,datawarehousing and various Internet enabling services. Data transmissionwould contribute a significant part of earnings in future.

We are a customer-focussed company. At present, more than 50 per cent of ourtotal staff strength of 450 employees is directly engaged in customer care.And we have made substantial investments in customer relationship managementand billing process.

What are your planned investments and the source of funds? Also, couldyou share your technology strategy?
We are looking at investing about $750 million by end of year 2002. We arealready negotiating with financial institutions and strategic investors forfunds. Moreover, the promoters would be pumping in substantial amount offunds in the near future. The IPO route would also be considered at a latterstage.

Our technology strategy is based on building up a Net-centric network usinga combination of optic fibre (especially in Mumbai) with broadband wirelesstechnology. We plan to eliminate the last mile bottleneck by providing opticfibre link upto the premises of high usage customers. We are planning a highspeed voice and data transmission network based on Internet Protocol (IP)and Asynchronous Transmission Mode (ATM) technology. In the initial phase,we are using ETDMA-based Wireless Local Loop (WLL) for local access andmicrowave technology for the long distance network.

What about the threat from the global trend of voice traffic increasinglyshifting to cellular networks or the possibility of voice over IP? Also,wouldn't the phenomenon of fast growth in data traffic, as compared to voicetraffic, adversely affect the future earnings?
Cellular or mobile telephony has its unique and specific utility. Althoughthere will be sharp growth in mobile telephony, we do not expect anysignificant shift in voice traffic from fixed-line services to cellularservices. Moreover, with the poor quality of voice transmission overcellular phones, it is extremely difficult to have any serious businessconversation over cellular phones. In fact, the free call by customerconcept would provide substantial increase in revenue per line in future.Coming to voice over Internet, it is prohibited and illegal in India and anumber of countries around the world. We also do not see any adverse effectof data traffic overtaking voice traffic.

As a matter of fact, the trend of increase in data traffic over voicetraffic will result in earnings from our application services. This isbecause of Net-centric nature of our network which is equally capable ofhandling voice as well as data traffic.

How to you react to the Ministry of Telecom's concern that the privatesector operators have defaulted on their obligation of providing publictelephone connection in the rural parts of their respective circles?
In the NTP 1999, the government made amendments in various conditions andthe policy framework related to the license agreement. It is extremelyunfair to pull out a particular condition of the original agreement andcreate an issue without considering the impact of changes like allowingmultiple operators as compared to duopoly. On the other hand, theregulations related to domestic long distance calls will be furtherdepressing the earnings.

We are definitely committed to providing village public telephones (VPTs)but at a later stage. We plan to provide quality services in rural areas.Currently, more than 50 per cent of the three lakh VPTs provided by DoT donot work.

How important is vendor financing? Are the multinational vendors withtheir deep pockets arm-twisting the cash strapped private sector serviceproviders and killing the domestic telecom equipment manufacturing industry?
Vendor financing plays an important role in building up the requiredinfrastructure. Most of the equipment is procured from the multinational dueto their technical superiority. Moreover, in future, it is simpler toupgrade the network with the latest technology products. It is like along-term partnership. Whereas, most of the R&D in domestic companies isnothing more than reverse engineering or what we call screw-driver R&D. Wedo procure some terminal-end products from the domestic manufacturers. Andwe intend to do most of our future purchases in the local currency - rupees.