Bharti filed its application on Monday, a couple of weeks after the other serious contender for NLD, the Reliance group filed its application, confirmed a senior Bharti official.

Both Bharti and Reliance in the past couple of months have aggressively been laying optical fibre cables for their long-distance operations, but have not filed for licences. Reason: It is important to get the network ready before applying for licences due to the stringent roll-out requirements and performance related bank guarantees linked to the roll-out obligations.The long distance operations were opened up for competition in August 2000.

However, due to these roll-out obligations there had not been any applicants for over six months. The secretary, Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in an earlier interview with the Financial Express had said: "It makes sense for applicants to first get their network ready first, because their clock would start ticking the moment the licence is signed."

Despite the applications being filed, it would still be some time before the licences are issued, because even the licence agreement has not been finalised as yet.

Even after the letter of intent is issued, there is a gap of 90 days within which the licence has to be issued.

Subsequently, the applicant company shall pay one time entry fee of Rs 100 crore. In addition, four bank guarantees of Rs 100 crore each shall be given. These would be released back on completion of each phase of the project- fulfillment of the network roll out obligations by establishing Point of Presence in Long Distance Charging Areas (LDCA)s.

The applicant company is expected to submit along with the application, the roll-out plan, which indicates the LDCAs that the company is planning to cover in each telecom circle in the four phases of the project.

This will include the coverage of uneconomic and remote areas. Since many vexatious issues such as interconnect and Universal Obligation (USO) Fund are still pending with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), hence true roll-out of long distance telephony is still some way off.