DOT's silliness knows no bounds - Mr. Arun

[vamsi@siliconcorp.com]

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    I have copied the following article posted by Mr. Arun Mehta on
India-GII.  DoT is Department of Telecom.
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A Business Standard front page headline "Rs. 15 lakh fee by DoT stalls
Net
trading" on September 20, 1999, tells about how the DoT wants each stock

broker who wishes to start offering on-line trading services to pay them
Rs.
1.5 million (approx. US$ 36,000) a year merely for interconnecting the
terminal that is connected to the Net with the one the broker uses for
trading!

Why does the country put up with such silliness? All this time, India's
Internet backbone has been in the US, because the DoT made it so hard
and
expensive for ISPs to interconnect in India. The DoT has this absurd
attitude that anything you wish to do in telecom, they must extract
their
pound of flesh -- they consider telecom to be their exclusive preserve
in
the country, and anyone "encroaching" on their turf has to pay.

I thought the TRAI set prices in the country. How can the DoT then do
these
things arbitrarily?

Another way out would be for the stock exchanges to convert their
network
into a Virtual Private Network on the Internet, so that they aren't
using
two separate networks.

Arun Mehta, B-69, Lajpat Nagar-I, New Delhi-110024. Phone 6841172,
6849103
http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta



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