At a time when the Indian government is talking about connecting the last mile, its laggardness in the international bandwidth segment may act as an impediment. While South Korea has 14 operators offering international bandwidth, in India there are only three. The Tata-managed Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd controls over 75 per cent of the international bandwidth market, Bharti and Reliance Infocomm have 17 per cent and 8 per cent share respectively.
One of the reasons for the low number of operators in India has been the high entry fee for offering international bandwidth. As per the existing license regime, only international long-distance operators can offer international bandwidth for which there was a license fee of 5,528,527.20 USD until last month, when it was brought down to 552,852.72 USD. While in European markets, operators do not have to pay entry fee for offering bandwidth.
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