Internet

UK based Vodafone has bought a 10.05% stake in Bharti Televentures Limited - owners of the brand Airtel - India's largest mobile operator. The deal worth USD 1.5 billion, is said to be the largest ever foreign investment in India, and marks Vodafone's second foray into the Indian market. The British giant had previously invested in RPG Cellular, but sold its stake to Aircel in 2003.

Incidentally, Vodafone's current CEO is an Indian - Arun Sarin.

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MTNL, in a bid to meet subscriber targets, has lowered the price of its basic plan from Rs.399/month to Rs.199/month. These basic plans are however, severely restricted by extremely low download limits.

It is expected that BSNL - MTNL's sister company - will soon follow suit.

GAIL, PowerGrid Corporation Ltd and RailTel have entered into a strategic alliance to pool their bandwidth infrastructure, thereby forming India's second largest (after BSNL) bandwidth network. The three companies control close to 60,000 kms of fibre between them, and are scheduled to increase this even further in the next few years.

VSNL's acquisition of international bandwidth provider TeleGlobe has been approved by the latter's shareholders. This follows VSNL's acquisition of the Tyco Global network about a year ago.

Full story: Business Week,

President A.P.J. Kalam expressed his concerns over the security ramifications of mapping software alá Google Earth, in a speech to the National Police Academy in Hyderabad. In his presentation, he drew attention to the availability of high-resolution images of sensitive Indian installations and noted the lack of appropriate national and international laws to control the dissemination of such data.

Full Speech and presentation: President Of India Website.

Assocham and ISPAI, among others, are not satisifed with some of the changes in the proposed IT Act 2005.

“The new Act will scare away foreign clients from Indian BPOs as they will not be held liable for any data theft/breach. The deletion of section 66, which deals with hacking will abet cyber crimes in India. We must take great caution as laws cannot be amended every now and then” Mr Duggal added.

Bombay's Park Plaza Towers is reportedly going to be offering its residents Broadband over Power Line (BPL) Internet access. The service is being provided by PLC Network Solutions, a subsidiary of Trimax Corporation (formerly KIWI Network Solutions Inc. and Koala International Wireless previous to that).

PLC's new 205 mbps devices will provide The Park Plaza Towers with symmetrical upload and download speeds of 20-30 mbps -- enough to fully exploit high-bandwidth applications such as VoIP, video-on-demand and IPTV.

According to figures released by the TRAI, VSNL/Tata Indicom has been steadily losing subscribers to other ISPs. With a loss of 24% of its subscriber base in the quarter ending March 2005, and a further loss of 9% in the quarter ending June 2005, VSNL's share has now slipped down to a measly 10.88%.

Summarised figures of the top five ISPs (quarter ending June 2005) were reported as follows:

Total Internet subscriber base: 5.9 million
The above figures include all modes of Internet access.