Dishnet DSL: Spearheading The Net Business

Dishnet DSL Ltd, a part of the Sterling Group, is a
private internet service provider in India which became operational last year. The company offers its internet access and related services in the brandname of ETH Internet and has a multi-pronged strategy to expand its frontiers. Dishnet has set for itself the mandate of making internet access available and affordable to the masses. The company which has category A license to operate as a national player in the country, is busy setting up its broad band technology. Further, it is all set to make headlines with the launch of its DSL services in the country. 

It started offering internet access services across 18 locations in the country, and plans to increase it to 54 cities by March 2000 and to 200 cities by next year. In the last nine months of operation, the company has gained a total of 30,000 subscribers. It has also planned investment of about Rs130 crore for acquiring its own private internet gateway. Dishnet DSL also has its own education-to-home (ETH) hubs, akin to internet cafes across the country to make internet access available in different parts of the country. 

The company has clearly segmented the market into the low, middle and
high-end categories for its business purposes. At the entry level, it offers services through its ETH hubs, where people with no access to telephones or computers, can walk in and utilize services at affordable rates. For the middle-end, the company has innovative products for dial-up internet access, which it offers through Freedom Plan, Dell schemes and others. For the high-end, comprised mostly of the corporates, it is to offer broadband and digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies. DSL is a relatively new broadband communication technology that transmits higher bandwidth over simple copper telephone lines carrying voice and data signals. 

In future the focus will be towards portals–local language portals, the first vernacular portal in Tamil called minnambalam.com–education, gaming, video and audio streaming and virtual private networks. Dishnet’s value-added services also include movies-on-demand-over-net. In two years from now, the company intends to graduate to an application service provider. Further, the company is looking at the largely untapped education
segment to offer ETH concepts to different groups of communities. 

Dishnet plans to go for a Nasdaq listing and an ADR and is awaiting clearance from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. Industry sources quote that the company is considering a size ranging from $150-$300 million for the issue.