| All other operators also charge Rs 2.40 per minute for nationwide STD calls. |
| MTNL has already decided to pare charges from June 1 on the Delhi-Mumbai route to Rs 1.20 per three minutes. |
| MTNL Chairman and Managing Director RSP Sinha said: "We are working on this. Now that we have got good price quotes to carry our nationwide STD traffic, our rates will go down further. The Delhi-Mumbai rate of 40 paise a minute will be a benchmark." |
| The rate cut will be possible on account of the company receiving competitive offers to carry its domestic long distance traffic across India from Reliance, VSNL (which already carries its Delhi-Mumbai traffic) and Bharti in a Rs 600-crore tender, which opened here today. Till now, MTNL paid BSNL 65 paise per minute as carriage charge. |
| Sinha added rates could be reduced further, but for the termination charge of 30 paise that it will have to pay various networks. "A combination of lower carriage costs and reduced access deficit charge will allow us to offer cheaper rates," he said. |
| Meanwhile, Sinha added users of its network in both cities will no longer need STD connections to call each other. "Those who do not have STD enabled connections will still be able to call one another in both cities like they call Noida or Gurgaon by prefixing a code," he said. |
| In order to meet the expected spurt in volume (by some generous estimates traffic may grow four to five times), MTNL is also enhancing capacities on the Delhi-Mumbai route. |
| "We are putting in place the infrastructure to deal with the spurt in traffic," Sinha said. |
| Sinha also expects volume growth to not only compensate but actually boost revenues. "The elasticity factor is very difficult to predict, but we are sure that volumes will more than make up for any shortfall," he said. |
| For the fiscal ended March 31, 2006, the company had revenues of over Rs 5249.4 crore and a net profit of Rs 578 crore. |
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