The TATA’s bought over VSNL a while ago and the first big change in added services was launched on August 21, 2007 in terms of a long distance calling service to India. They are not the first to offer such a service and am sure not the last.

Reliance India Call and Airtel India Home are two services that have been on for a while. Reliance has been around for close to three years. I remember getting invited to join Reliance India as a beta tester way back in April 2004. The first two months of calls were absolutely free and since then they pegged it at about 12.9 cents per minute. However after a couple of harrowing incidents with Reliance in late 2005 I swore never to use them again.

Airtel India Call is another great service and Shirrin and I use thate extensively. Now with Tata’s product launch I am sure we are going to jump on to their service and become regulars.

It was high time the Tata’s came out with this service. Early in 2005 Tata’s bought the world wide fibre optic cable network that the defunct giant TYCO had laid out. This is a physical cable network of fibre optic cables circling the globe. At the dot come height, the network was valued at 30 billion US$. When Tata’s picked it up, they paid a paltry 135 million US$. The total length of the network is about 65,000 km touching all 5 continents.

I personally like TATA’s website design and its much more faster and responsive as compared to Reliance or Airtel.

In terms of rates, I think it is the cheapest one just now at 7.2 cents a minute.

So give trueroots a trial run. I used it for a few calls and the call quality and clarity are very good. Of course the real test will come in a few months when their customer base and their volume increases.