This video chronicles the real story of the 15th August 1995 VSNL launch—the uncertainties, the sleepless nights, and the immense challenges the team navigated behind the scenes. It’s a raw look at the grit required to build a future no one could yet see.
A huge thank you to Neeraj Sonker, Suchit Nanda, and the many contributors for documenting this legacy. Seeing these moments captured is truly special for those of us who were there in the trenches.
I look back with immense pride at my own role during those foundational years at VSNL. Serving as a bridge between a complex new service and the users who needed guidance, my focus was on providing the technical backbone, support, and advocacy to ensure the Internet wasn’t just launched, but understood and embraced.
As a Philomath, this role perfectly matched my enthusiasm for mastering emerging technologies and sharing that knowledge. We didn’t just launch a service; we started a revolution that changed lives—and the experience remains one of the most exhilarating chapters of my career. Since we were technically strong, we were asked to provide support to most of the VIP customers of VSNL and I had the privilege of personally training many public figures and celebrities.
My company was appointed for both roles – to market the Internet service as well as to provide onsite support to users. In 1995, the major (or only) telephony provider was MTNL. Most of the exchanges were analog and did not support data transmission. In that era, the typical speed was 9.6Kbps or 14.4Kbps (Yes!! Only 9600 bits per second). Today’s generation is used to speed in Mbps and Gbps and they can’t even imagine such low speeds.
It was a major challenge to convince customers that their Internet was slow or disconnecting frequently due to problems with the phone lines. Many a times, we got a common come back – but voice calls are crystal clear.
Another issue we faced frequently was that the system configuration was not as per the minimum recommendations in terms of processor and memory. In those days, cost of computers was very high and customers were reluctant to spend on the necessary upgrades. Some customers even thought that we were trying to cross-sell hardware components to boost our revenue.
My organization lived up to the challenges both in terms of marketing (we were awarded no 1 marketing agents 3 years running) as well as customer support, for which I had developed a team of competent engineers. Over the next 3 years, we successfully onboarded over 5,000 users in Mumbai region. This was an achievement of sorts, given our small size and keeping in mind that we not only sold these customers Internet connections, but were also mandated to carry out setup, training and post installation support for 1 year.
We overcame the marketing challenge by collaborating with IT and affiliated industry vendors and using a win-win-win formula – the customers won by getting premium service at their doorstep at the same price as VSNL, the vendors got more tractions and footfalls and off course we benefited by reaching out customers outside our direct sphere of contacts. This was possible because our associate vendors trusted out quality of service and were confident that we would not poach their clients.
An added bonus for our clients was the goodie bag they got along with personalized services. This included discounts on purchase of modem, free subscription to Computers@Home / Express Computers magazines, discount coupons from the Computer Book Shop, The Great Escape etc.
With the extended marketing reach thanks to our associates, we had to gear up our logistics to match the high demand. In an era of no mobiles, no delivery services like Rapido and Porter and much before Metro lines, we had to ensure that we could offer a quick turn around time to our customers. We evolved a system whereby we would Fax the complete application form, along with instructions to clients and our delivery boys would check-in regularly from land-lines to get addresses of clients where the forms were ready for pick-up. Later, when pagers were introduced, we invested in Alpha-numeric pagers for our delivery boys. Now, we need not wait for them to check-in, addresses were paged to them directly. We realized that one of the major bottlenecks was the high rate of rejection by VSNL due to incomplete / incorrect application forms. We took care of that problem by writing our own instruction set for filling the form and training our delivery boys to scrutinize the filled forms and taking corrective action on the spot. This ensured that all the applications submitted by us were accepted. In fact, VSNL later adapted our instruction set in toto and circulated it PAN India.
The combination of collaboration, logistics and resolving bottlenecks ensure that our clients were able to submit the forms quickly, accurately and got professional installation and training immediately on getting their log in details. This naturally led to excellent feedback and great word-of-mouth publicity, which in turn helped us to onboard a record number of clients. In hind sight, it was an excellent decision to form collaborations and invest in logistics and support infrastructure rather than using our resources for advertising and marketing.
The lessons of collaborative marketing learnt during this period have influenced many of my later business ventures and even today, I advise young startups and entrepreneurs – don’t compete, collaborate. This is all the more relevant to boot-strapped startup where resources are limited and collaborations help them leverage upon the experience and strength of their collaborators.