Vsnl Gears Up To Meet Us Calls Demand

In a bid to manage the sudden spurt in telephone traffic between India and the United States, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) has employed transit route circuits in addition to the direct ones.

VSNL today said it has made necessary arrangements to ensure that there are no future interruptions of long-distance calls to the US.

All the international gateways of VSNL have seen an increase in traffic following terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the US yesterday.

For instance, VSNL's Mumbai gateway witnessed a three-fold increase in incoming calls and a ten-fold increase in outgoing ones.

As a result of heavy incoming traffic from all over the world to the US, international gateways were clogged and outgoing call clearances from India had come down. Incoming calls from the US continued to be cleared without any significant degradation.

A government statement said today that though no major abnormality was observed in the Indian international network segment between India and the US from the VSNL gateways, very heavy processor loading (nearly 100 per cent) due to continuos repeated attempts for outgoing calls was witnessed.

This situation remained up to about 1 am on Wednesday, after which the processor loading came down to near normal and the call clearance rate also started improving.

Communication minister Pramod Mahajan and chairman of the Telecom Commission Shyamal Ghosh, presently on an official visit to Russia, have cut short their visit and are returning tonight said the press statement.

When contacted, KP Tiwari, officiating director of VSNL said the quality of telephone connections between India and the US had been affected due to a huge number of calls during a particular time on Tuesday.

"Otherwise, there were no major problems. Connections were quite fine on Wednesday as well," he added.

Though revenues from US calls accounted for a major chunk of the VSNL topline, yesterday's disruptions will not have any impact on the revenues of the company, analysts said.

It is learnt that telephone connections between the US and other major countries had also faced troubles.

As US-based companies employ a number of software engineers and other professionals in New York and other parts of America, the number of enquiries and calls from India was more compared with other normal days.