DataAccess Plans Rs 200 Crore Investment in Indian Operations

To mark its presence in the National Long Distance (NLD) market, Delhi based DataAccess, one of the International Long Distance (ILD) players in India, would use Bharti’s NLD backbone and its optic-fiber channel which are already in place. An announcement to this effect is likely to be made in the next few days. The company is also planning to invest Rs 200 crore in expanding its infrastructure in India. This involves increasing the number of its PoP’s from its present 21 to 84 besides investing in switches for which it made $ eight million equipment purchase from the Israeli company
VocalTec.

According to Siddharth Ray, Managing Director, DataAccess the company is already the second largest ILD player in the country with around 37 percent of the market share after VSNL which still leads with 53 percent. Since starting its operations in April 2002, DataAccess has already logged in 350 million minutes in outgoing ILD calls in 2002 and 122 million minutes in January this year. The company is expecting to generate around Rs 2,500 crore from its Indian operations by the end of this fiscal. In addition, the company is expecting another Rs 1,000 crore from its global operations, primarily through DataAccess US and DataAccess UK. Globally it plans to login eight billion minutes in ILD next year. 

DataAccess also expects to login 1.5 billion minutes by this year and increase this figure to two billion minutes next year. It hopes that this would make it the country’s biggest ILD player especially once VSNL’s premier carrier status goes. As part of this initiative, it is convening ILD players’ consortium called the Indian Carrier Association, which is going to be registered within the next few days.

CNS