Wednesday, July 13 2005 19:33 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: In a move that could hot up the telecom war, Anil Ambani owned Reliance Infocomm has accused VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd) of killing the competition in bandwidth market by creating both price and non-price barriers. In a communication to telecom regulator TRAI, Infocomm, headed by Ambani has said that Tata's controlled VSNL was denying access to cable landing stations by resorting to both price and non-price barriers, thus killing competition.

The communication was in response to a consultation paper on "Measures to promote Competition in International Private Leased Circuit in India" even as VSNL countered the charges saying it was not charging high tariff for its facilities and the company was all for the competition to benefit consumers.

However, VSNL disagreed with Infocomm on the need for regulatory intervention in the bandwidth pricing mechanism and said that there was enough competition even now and prices would thus be market determined.

VSNL's commercial decisions on the tariff and non-tariff practices are driven by market forces, the Tata company said.

Based on the available infrastructure, the current IPLC market is already competitive enough in India and there is no bottleneck for accessing to capacity available at the cable heads, VSNL said in its response.

"The lack of competition in the IPLC segment is primarily on account of the incumbent (VSNL's) deliberate obstructions and denial of access to its cable landing station by resorting to both price and non-price barriers," RIC said. Reliance further said although TRAI had already initiated controls on the IPLC pricing, all efforts to introduce effective competition has been stonewalled by the incumbent.