Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd

Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) was India s sole telecom carrier for international calls until 2002. While domestic calls are carried by Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), and private companies, international calls were routed through VSNL. It also provided bandwidth for Internet service providers.

VSNL was incorporated on April 1, 1986 as a wholly owned government entity. In 2002 the Indian Government privatized VSNL . The Tata Group group acquired a controlling stake in VSNL and the government holds a minority stake. The company is now branded as VSNL TataIndicom. The company stock is now traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange and also trades in the United States as an American Depository Receipt (ADR) under the ticker symbol VSL. Revenues for the financial year 2004 stood at approximately 780 Million USD.

The company operates landing stations, undersea cables, ISP POP s, managed services, leased lines and datacenters across India. VSNL was the first company in India to start offering dial-up internet access in 1995 and had about 3-4 million dialup users at the beginning of 2005. Previously it also handled the allocation of bandwidth for the other ISP s in India. The company acquired successful Internet service provider Dishnet DSL. VSNL has been active on the global bandwidth scene. It bought assets of Tyco Global for $130M in 2003 and in July 2005 acquired Bermuda based Teleglobe for $239M.

Today VSNL provides Long distance services, Dial Up ISP services and ADSL Broadband services for residential customers and Leased lines (IP and dedicated), Wavelengths, Managed hosting for business customers.

Today TataIndicom fiercely competes in all these services with state owned and private enterprises. With the new acquisitions VSNL today is the third largest carrier of voice traffic worldwide behind AT&T and MCI.

VSNL has since been chosen as 26 % owner of the Second Network Operator to take on South Africa s fixed line monopoly, Telkom