We'd rather concentrate on our ISP business," Mr RV Shahi chairman and managing director, BSES Limited told The Financial Express. Mr Shahi also ruled out a listing as an immediate possibility. "The listing can be a possibility within one year," he said. Sources close to BTL's future roadmap said that Jaipur and Surat, for one, had been and are still on the company's agenda as the next destinations after Mumbai. The list also included Pune, Hyderabad and Delhi. In these places the company would have laid the fibre either on its own or partnered with a local player. InDelhi, for instance, the company was said to have been "in advance talks" with the Bharati Group.

The company, it is learnt, had inter-city plans too. The Mumbai-Bangalore route was one where the company had contemplated buying bandwidth capacity. The shift in gameplan is significant inasmuch as the industry analysts said that the company would need to look beyond the ISP business and that replicating the intra-city OFC backbone model elsewhere was a good option for it. But they did not know how far correct it would be to look at BTL's gameplan separately and not as part of Reliance's overall broadband plan, now that the latter has a 26 per cent stake in BSES. "Reliance has a national optic fibre plan and it is only natural for it to see that BTL fits into its scheme of things rather than work at cross-purposes," said one analyst. The gameplan shift, apparently, has also led to the IPO plans being put off by about six months. The company, it is learnt, was actively pursuing separately listing and would have filed for listing in a couple of months time.