Videsh Sanchar Nigam (VSNL) has expressed fears of a churn in customers following a Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) order to co-locate clients routers on its premises and has requested the regulator to provide a level-playing field. VSNL, in its letter dated April 11, 2005, has said that TRAI is yet to issue similar orders to other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and International Long Distance Operators (ILDOs), which may result in its customers moving over to other service providers. Earlier, Trai in its letter dated April 08, 2005, has said VSNL has not provisioned international bandwidth to ISPs in a non-discriminatory manner and some of them were provisioned International Private Leased Line Circuits (IPLCs) without co-locating a router on its premises. Even though VSNL implemented these for all its new customers, the company could not succeed in implementing these among its existing customers, since they saw this as an "unwarranted stipulation on them as it is not being insisted by another ILDOs," it said. Due to TRAI's orders, VSNL has said its existing customers have threatened to migrate to other ILDOs prescribing no such obligations. VSNL has also sent a list of ISPs along with their router status to Trai on March 21, 2005, it said. The company had earlier highlighted the need for effective monitoring of time division multiplex bandwidth leased to ISPs, which was hailed by the TRAI in its communication to the Tata company.
