The district court of Netherlands ruled that Tata Communications must give Flag Telecom, now part of Reliance Communication, access to its landing station in Mumbai, which is owned by Tata Communications, erstwhile VSNL. Tata Communications will be ordered to pay the cost of the proceedings, said the court order.
The dispute between the two companies goes back a few years when Flag accused VSNL of denying it free access to its cable landing station and of therefore having a monopolistic hold on bandwidth prices.
Flag wanted access for enhancing the capacity of its cable system. However, VSNL said that it was not under obligation to grant access under the construction and maintenance agreement between the two parties.