It began with the Open Sky policy for the airlines where private airlines were encouraged to run their services in India and abroad ending the monopoly of Indian Airlines and Air India, the national air operators. Now it is the turn of VSAT operators will have the choice to directly hire bandwidth from foreign and domestic players.



They can now negotiate with domestic and foreign players directly including ISRO. A senior executive in a leading VSAT company said; ‘An Open Sky policy will make the service more affordable to the end user as there are about 15 international satellite operators with capacity overlooking India’.



Department of Telecommunications sources said however, this would also mean that VSAT operators will be subject to security and monitoring restrictions applicable to Internet Service Providers. Besides, the first right of refusal would be given to ISRO in case price negotiations with the organization were to fail.



Sources said at present, most VSAT operations are done on the KU band frequency. Since technology is fast moving towards exploiting the KA Band, that reduces the cost of hardware and services, the Open Sky policy is likely to permit the transition.



Nonetheless, this is very good news. It will also mean that poor services as faced so frequently by VSAT operators due to state monopoly till now are likely to become a thing of the past. End-users can expect to get their issues and complaints addressed much faster.





News : Business Standard Image : Convergence Plus