After about 2 weeks of bluster from Indian cellcos, the TRAI finally shows some backbone and asks them to stop selective interconnects or else. Of course, this will probably go to court, and in no small part due to the TRAI’s mulish refusal to at least try to implement a calling-party-pays structure for cellular calls.

More interestingly, Sunil Mittal announced yesterday that Bharti received approval to carry data on their i2i submarine cable on Friday: We have got the necessary clearances on transmission of data only last Friday and the consumers of bandwidth can expect some announcement in this week. Last month, I had written about how 160G of India’s total outgoing bandwidth of 900G is wasted on voice alone. Things will improve further if Dishnet can get its act together.

Of course, most of India’s data flow is to the US, so I don’t know what latencies will result in these Singapore-routed connections, but anything around 300ms will be good to have.