VSNL acting chairman and managing director Amitabh Kumar said that multiple ISPs in the country required a common exchange point for interchange of traffic between customer groups and content sites.

He was delivering the keynote address at the three-day `ISP India '99,' an interactive conference and trade show for ISPs, which began here.

In a paper on `Roadmap for ISPs in India,' released on the occasion, he also said it was desirable, in the medium term, that VSNL be allowed to operate as a national exchange point, in addition to the international gateway facility, for which most ISPs could eventually need to connect to VSNL.

He said that till two weeks ago, 72 ISPs had been given licences, since the internet policy was unveiled last December but warned that "(poor) infrastructuralfacilities are a limiting factor in internet growth in the country."

Kumar also announced that VSNL, the exclusive provider of international telecommunication services to and from India, had become a member of the ISPs Association of India (ISPAI).

"We want to hear their (ISPs) grievances,'' he told reporters later.Kumar said within the next three years, the bandwidth requirement of internet could grow by a factor of 50 to 100, overtaking the telephone network bandwidth by a significant margin.

"On the internet backbone, the traffic is today doubling every 100 days and major backbones at peak times are suffering packet losses which can go up to 40 per cent," he observed.

Noting that the increasing number of ISPs would drive up the bandwidth demand, he said VSNL was negotiating for much larger capacities on the optical fibre systems for internet.

According to him, VSNL was going ahead with significant acquisitions of internet capacity to continue to meet requirements of all ISP providers through itsextensive reach of global fibre networks.