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Data Access confident of serving new clients

Our Bureau

NEW DELHI, Nov. 3

FOLLOWING its deal with BPL, Data Access will now service the around 12,000 dial-up subscribers and 95 corporates acquired from bplnet.com.

"We will service them for the unexpired hours of their Internet accounts," said Mr Siddhartha Ray, Managing Director of Data Access. Since all of them were pre-paid subscribers, there was no cash involved in the deal, he said.

Data Access has so far invested Rs 120 crore in Internet infrastructure, which would be enough to take care of the additional subscribers coming from BPL, Mr Ray said.

"We are currently making around Rs 4.60 crore per month and by 2002, we will achieve an annual turnover of Rs 120 crore," he said.

With this customer acquisition, Data Access will have around 300 corporate clients besides a presence in three new cities of Hyderabad, Kochi and Coimbatore.

It currently offers its services under the `NOW' brand name in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. bplnet.com too had a presence in these cities.

Under the deal, BPL has not sold its ISP business; it has only transferred subscribers to NOW, officials said. There was no financial transaction involved.

``We have only migrated our retail subscriber base to Data Access," said Mr Deepak Varma, Chief Executive Officer of bplnet.com, the Internet service providing arm of BPL.

He said bplnet.com decided to transfer all of its Internet subscribers to Data Access, an associate company of the Hong Kong-based Pacific Century Cyberworks, in order to focus only on the high-end Internet space, offering services such as WAP and GPRS.

Mr Varma said BPL had been forced to pull out of the retail business due to various regulations that made the business environment not conducive to ISP business, apart from the current market conditions that dissuaded foreign investors from putting their money in ISP ventures .

"The bandwidth cost is still prohibitively expensive and, for consumer business, one has to suffer cash burn," he said.

"We have made investments in the infrastructure and will continue to focus on the value-added areas of the business," Mr Varma said.