Internet

Tatas-owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited is planning to lay an undersea cable between India and Europe, covering about 10,000 km, at an investment of over $300 million (about Rs 1,350 crore).
When contacted, senior VSNL officials confirmed the plan and said that the company was expecting to have enough demand for bandwidth by 2008 and keeping this in mind VSNL has undertaken the major project.

Story: The Hindu.

India's mobile music industry will apparently soon overtake its conventional counterpart, with projected sales for 2006 set at INR 7.2 billion.

Airtel has a subscriber base of 20m, out of which 6m use mobile music services. During the last financial year, the company registered about 50m downloads. This year, music downloads are slated to go up as the company adds more subscribers.

For instance almost all operators have launched an "Easy Music" service that allows subscribers to walk into a mobile phone outlet, choose their favorite music from a huge catalogue of music in as many as 20 languages and download onto their mobile phones -- or even other digital devices like iPod -- for as little as 15 cents each for a Hindi song or 30 cents for an international song.

ET has an interesting article overviewing the impact of various technology initiatives in rural India including the following gem:

Started under the governement's Grameen Sanchar Sevak scheme, a postman totes mobile phone along with letters. Postmen carry WLL (wireless in local loop) phones while delivering mail. Residents can use the phone to make calls, both local and STD for certian charge. The service is targeted at people who do not own a telephone.

The ISPAI has refuted claims by the IMI that ISPs facilitate music piracy on the Internet.

"We reiterate that an ISP who merely provides such access is not in any way violating the provisions of the Copyright Act or the IT Act 2000," the ISPAI President, Mr Sanjay Dwivedi, said in the letter.

Light Reading is carrying a succinct article on why telco majors in India believe WiMAX will be the one. The article also outlines the reasons why the Indian broadband industry is where it is today, along with a few choice quotes like the following:

"It's absolutely abysmal compared to other countries with equal per capita GDP," says Ravi Bhagavan, vice president at consultancy Galileo Global Advisors, noting that the government's broadband policy target was to have 3 million subscribers by the end of 2005. "Talk about aiming at the sky and shooting the treetops...in fact I think they hit the trunk."