OMmalik : VSNL, a new voice giant awakens.

Growing up in India, I would often hear about VSNL, the god forsaken government owned phone company that made it almost impossible to call overseas, thanks to their over-the-top charges for long distance calls. It seemed they wanted to penalize people for making long distance calls. But that was almost a whole lifetime ago. Now VSNL is no longer a government owned company. Instead it is the center piece of Indian conglomerate, Tata’s telecom play. For less than half-a-billion dollars they have put together a global network that is third biggest voice carrier - right behind AT&T and MCI. (Telegeography puts the combined company at #5, so I need to clarify this point!)

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