Tata Power Broadband, a division of Tata Power Company, has said that it could face pressure on bandwidth pricing from new national long distance (NLD) players such as Reliance, among others.

A carriers’ carrier, Tata Power Broadband and other players, offer bandwidth in line with the pricing guidelines stipulated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

However, telecom players could offer discounts depending on volume and duration of contract.

Rahul Chaudhry, chief executive officer of Tata Power Broadband, which has a 700 km optic fibre backbone in Mumbai, said: “The new players could pose a threat to existing players. However, we have an established network and customer-base in Mumbai and pressure on intra-city bandwidth prices will not be severe as compared with the inter-city prices (i.e. Mumbai to New Delhi).”

Worldwide the inter-city bandwidth price has already crashed on account of excess capacity, while prices within the city have remained steady in the last few months as the number of companies which focus in a single location is less as against national players.

At present, prices range between Rs 11 lakh to Rs 22 lakh per two mega bits/second for a Mumbai-Delhi bandwidth connectivity and intra-city (for instance, in Mumbai) the price is around Rs 2 lakh (plus some 35 per cent discount depending on volume and duration of contract).

Tata Power Broadband, which had planned to invest around Rs 900 crore over a period of time for rolling out its national optic fibre backbone, has decided against it and has transferred the entire NLD business plan to the Tatas-promoted Videsh Sanchar Nigam, an international long distance player. This means, Tata Power will not be in the NLD business and it will be done by VSNL.

“We are not investing further in our broadband venture as we have covered the project in Mumbai within the budgeted outlay of Rs 160 crore and the rest of the project will be handled by VSNL” Chaudhry said.

Meanwhile, the company has decided to unveil multi protocol label switching (MPLS) services using solution from Cisco Systems.

MPLS technology is key in offering scalable virtual private networks with end-to-end quality of services guarantee.

Tata Power Broadband, which has over 38 customers in Mumbai, will now address new applications like IP contact centres, e-learning and voice-over-IP utilising Cisco MPLS enabled network.

At present, it caters to 1st and 2nd tier ISPs, Internet data centres, call centres, international carriers besides fixed line telecom and cellular operators in the country for assured bandwidth requirements.