| "We don't want to destroy the system. In no case, will they be allowed to provide VPN services," a senior department of telecommunications (DoT) official told Business Standard. |
| This comes as a blow to the ISPs which earn around Rs 1,000 crore from these corporate services in a market estimated at Rs 5,000 crore. |
| The DoT had set up a four-member committee comprising Member (Technology) KL Jain, Senior deputy director general JR Gupta, deputy director general (licensing regulation) HK Gupta and deputy director general (basic services) PK Mittal. |
| The committee had said the government was losing around Rs 150 crore as licence revenue annually due to the end-to-end services offered by ISPs, which pay a licence fee of Re 1. "As ISPs are paying Re 1 as licence fee, there is an issue of level playing field," the committee report had said. |
| State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) had complained to the DoT against the ISPs saying services by the latter were resulting in significant revenue loss. |
| On their part, ISPs said the services were not barred in the licence documents. They also said the government had allowed the services to function freely for the past six years. |
| In a letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on September 1, the DoT had said that ISPs could not be permitted to provide any end-to-end services under the present licence norms. |
| "Such facilities change the character and scope of the ISP licence and encroach upon licences of other telecom service providers," DoT said. |
| The department had cited the example of leased line services under these end-to-end services, which are provided by national and international long distance operators (NLDOs and ILDOs) and ISPs using VPN over Internet. |
| It had mentioned that scope of the ISP licence agreement was confined to providing Internet access or content services with a ban on Internet telephony. At a later stage, restricted Internet telephony was permitted. |
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