FAIRHAVEN, Mass. — Michael Brightman is reminded daily that workers in New Delhi do the same job he does.

His Indian counterparts routinely direct AT&T customers to him for long-distance billing problems that the New Delhi workers can’t answer.

Brightman and 139 others will be laid off this month from AT&T’s call center on Massachusetts’ southeastern coast. AT&T said the work force reduction resulted from a July decision to phase out residential long-distance service.

«This work did not move. It went away,» said spokeswoman Tracey Belko. «We are not moving any of these jobs overseas.»

Brightman and co-workers picketing here last month don’t buy it. To them, jobs are being lost in the United States, while increasing overseas. Union officials said AT&T gave information on its offshore activity in January showing one out of four AT&T customer calls were handled by independent U.S. contractors employing 1,400 workers overseas.

In five years, AT&T has cut its national call-center employment by half, to 3,270, the union said. «Is it coincidental, or is it a shift?» Brightman asked about his layoff.

Data on numbers of U.S. jobs moving overseas in recent years are scattered and unreliable. As the AT&T example shows, jobs may be cut in the United States, and employment may increase overseas, but companies are reluctant to draw connections between the two, while unions are only too willing to do so. Groups such as the U. S. Chamber of Commerce peg the number at perhaps 200,000 jobs a year.

But a new report commissioned by a bipartisan congressional commission said 406,000 jobs will migrate overseas this year, double the conventional wisdom. This trend is expected to continue for several years as a greater variety of jobs are offshored, including to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Job movement overseas «is absolutely accelerating, and it’s changing in its nature,» said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, who prepared the report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. «Whereas in 2001 it was almost all in manufacturing, now we see an increase in information technology, communications, financial services, and white-collar work, from research and design to back office.» The report will be presented at public hearings in Seattle in January.

Some economists cite growing numbers of U.S. jobs transplanted overseas as the main reason for slow employment growth during the current economy recovery. Another 400,000 jobs added to the total 1.8 million jobs created in the United States in 2004 would be «a big deal,» said Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley’s chief economist. «Offshore labor pools have become increasingly attractive,» he said, and «more and more of the new hiring incrementally is occurring offshore.»

But Shang-Jin Wei of the International Monetary Fund argued when a company employs people overseas, lower costs and high profits enable it to hire elsewhere in the organization.

«We create one job for every job lost,» he said.

Greater ease in Internet and phone transmission, spiraling healthcare costs to cover U.S. employees, and more experience employing people in foreign lands are fueling overseas hiring for jobs that once would have remained here. The most compelling incentive remains the disparity between wages earned in the United States and in less-developed nations.

In India, a computer programmer with a college degree and two or three years’ experience earns about $20,000 a year, said firms that employ workers there. Indian workers who process financial transactions make $12,000 to $15,000. Call-center workers there earn about $1,200 a year, compared with Brightman’s $40,000 salary from AT&T.

The joint report, by Cornell and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the first to look at offshoring in all industries and to use the same method to compare two years, 2001 and 2004. Private consulting firms have examined specific industries. An often-cited study by Forrester Research last spring estimated 225,000 white-collar U.S. service jobs would locate overseas in 2004, bringing to 540,000 the total of those jobs now overseas. A 2004 study by Deloitte Research said 850,000 financial jobs could be headed overseas by 2010. The new report found that 204,000 jobs were moved overseas in 2001, doubling to 406,000 this year.

There is no reliable government data. The U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys employers on job relocations, but those data are widely viewed as too low. In the first quarter of 2004, the bureau reported 4,633 jobs were moved offshore. The bureau said it could not estimate second-quarter activity, due to incomplete information from employers.

«Companies are very reluctant to say what they’re doing,» said Ronil Hira, professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology. «They don’t want to take the public-relations hit.»

To estimate blue- and white-collar job movements, Bronfenbrenner and UMass professor Stephanie Luce tallied reports of job transfers in the United States and foreign, English-language media in the first quarter of 2004. They then applied a multiplier to increase the job estimates and adjust for the underreporting.

In Mexico, for example, they estimated fully two-thirds of production shifts in 2004 were reported by the media, because all of the jobs were in manufacturing and were publicized by unions or confirmed by business filings to the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission, government applications for worker assistance under the federal Trade Adjustment Act, and state plant-closing notifications. In contrast, only one-third of jobs moving to Asia are reported, they said, because the region attracts smaller employers less likely to be in manufacturing and unlikely to report movements.

The U. S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief economist, Martin Regalia, criticized the 406,000 job-loss estimate in 2004 as at the «high end of any estimates out there.» The multiplier was arbitrary, he said, because it was not based on hard data. «I don’t think starting with news reports is the way to do scientific research.»

Bronfenbrenner defended her data as «extremely conservative» and said firms go to great lengths to suppress or downplay in the U.S. press any jobs shifts, though they may publicize them in the country where they are relocating.

For example, the report cites the U.S. consulting firm of Accenture Ltd., which last year told the Press Trust of India it would add 5,700 employees there by the end of 2004. Early this year, it laid off 90 employees at its Delaware software development office. While Accenture told The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., that India «is one of the areas we’re looking at,» it was never made clear whether the jobs were ultimately moved, the report said. The researchers ultimately could not produce a firm figure on job movement overseas in this case; the multiplier, she said, is intended to account for situations such as Accenture’s.

To make a connection between a layoff in the United States and job expansion in India is «simplistic,» said Fred Hawrysh, a spokesman for Accenture. Hawrysh said Accenture’s U.S. employment overall rose last year.

Dallas-based Texas Instruments has operated in Attleboro, Mass., since the 1920s. It is now laying off 1,180 in the plant, which makes pressure and temperature sensors. The jobs are being transferred to Texas Instruments plants in South Korea, Mexico, Malaysia, and China, said spokeswoman Linda Megathlin. The layoffs are part of a conversion of Attleboro from a manufacturing to a marketing and research facility. To staff the office, the company plans to hire about 100 engineers, technicians, and managers, she said.

Attleboro Mayor Kevin Dumas is philosophical about layoffs in his city. While Texas Instruments is no longer Attleboro’s biggest employer, «We’re also seeing an influx of new jobs coming open in the city,» he said.

All Jay Carvalho knows is he could make a good living, without a college degree, working for AT&T. Facing layoff, the 26-year-old has «no idea» what is next but said it won’t be easy to improve on this job, which pays about $40,000 a year, with benefits. «I’ll be happy if I get $10 an hour,» he said.

One of India’s leading telecommunications providers will use Cisco Systems’ equipment to build its new Ethernet-based broadband network.

Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL) announced on Tuesday that Cisco will supply one of its divisions, Tata Indicom Broadband Services, with equipment to build a metropolitan area Ethernet network. The multiyear contract is worth $110 million (5 billion rupees).

The new network will provide Tata Indicom’s business and residential customers with broadband services that range in speed from 10 megabits per second to 100 megabits per second.

Cisco’s 12000, 7600 and 7300 series routers and Cisco’s Catalyst 3750 and 2950 series switches will be used to build the network. Tata Indicom plans to use Cisco’s technology to deliver a «triple play» of bundled services over the Ethernet infrastructure. Specifically, it plans to offer residential customers services such as Internet Protocol telephony, broadcast TV and video-on-demand. It also plans to use the network to deliver business services such as video conferencing and IP virtual private network.

The first phase of Tata Indicom’s plan will cover eight cities in India and will be capable of connecting more than a million customers.

Cisco has already made significant inroads with Indian carriers in providing IP equipment to build their long-distance Internet networks. In 2001, VSNL announced it was using Cisco’s IP core and edge routers to build its international long-distance network. In April 2004, Cisco announced a deal with Bharti Infotel, a subsidiary of Bharti Tele-Venturesone of four major telecom providers in Indiato be the main equipment supplier for its IP-based multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network.

Now, Cisco is getting into deals to build out local and regional networks.

Ethernet, the predominant technology used in corporate networks, is becoming more popular in service provider networks in India and elsewhere to deliver broadband services. Carriers see Ethernet as the perfect convergence technology, allowing them to easily offer a mix of voice and data traffic over a single network using Internet Protocol.

Metro Ethernet is also expected to save carriers money. Some groups estimate that telephone companies could cut their operating costs by 23 percent annually by using Ethernet services in their metro networks rather than traditional telecommunications services.

Other Indian service providers are also building metro Ethernet networks. Reliance Infocomm, which has built a national Internet backbone using mostly Nortel Networks products, has also laid thousands of miles of fiber in India’s major cities and built out metro Ethernet networks.

New Delhi, Oct. 7: Post-paid mobile telephone subscribers will now get itemised bills for long distance calls (STD) free of charge.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today made it mandatory for the operators to provide itemised STD bills free-of-charge if any customer requests for the same.

„We have been receiving consumer complaints that the service providers are charging extra for providing the itemised bills in respect of long distance calls. The authority considered the matter keeping in view the provisions in the various licences relating to billing and customer service and have given this direction to all the mobile operators,“ a Trai official said.

The licence agreements for basic, national long distance (NLD) and international long distance (ILD) services stipulates that itemised bills should be provided to customers relating to long distance calls without demanding any extra charge whereas the licence agreements for cellular mobile service and unified access services lays down that directions of Trai, from time to time, in this regard will apply.

Trai official said, „Subscribers have the right to know and verify the charges for long-distance calls levied by the service providers and itemised bills are required for this purpose.“

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Friday recommended a sharp cut in the licence fee for telecom companies from 15 per cent to 6 per cent of the adjusted gross revenue.

It also proposed to exempt infrastructure providers, radio paging and Internet telephony companies as well as operators in rural areas with less than 1 per cent teledensity from paying the licence fee, registration charges and obtaining bank guarantees.

In its draft recommendations on unified licensing, the regulator has proposed a Rs 107 crore (Rs 1.07 billion) registration charge for telecom service providers in addition to a charge based on the entry fee paid by basic telecom service providers that received licences for various circles from 2001.

TV Ramachandran, director-general, Cellular Operators Association of India, said the entry fee imposed was too high. «It will create an entry barrier,» he said.

Further, the draft does not propose inter-circle connectivity. «The consumer would have benefited had the regulator allowed it,» he added.

Ramachandran, however, said Trai’s proposal to reduce the licence fee for unified licence holders would enable companies to lower tariffs in long-distance services.

«This has been one of our long-standing demands. This may lead to tariff reductions on long-distance calls,» he said.

RP Singh, chairman and managing director, PowerGrid, said telecom infrastructure providers’ operating expenditure would come down if the government implemented the proposed zero-licence fee regime. «Market forces will decide whether bandwidth prices will decrease,» he added.

The fixed component of the registration charges is proposed to be reduced gradually from Rs 107 crore to Rs 30 lakh (Rs 300 million) after five years. The fixed Rs 107 crore component represents the discounted value of national long-distance and international long- distance entry fees.

Trai has proposed three categories: licensing through authorisation, class licence and unified licence. The unified licence will include basic and cellular services, long-distance, Internet telephony, broadcasting services and all services in the other two categories.

Class licenses will include V-SAT, niche operators in rural areas where the teledensity is below 1 per cent and all services under the licensing-through-authorisation category, which covers infrastructure providers, radio paging and Internet services, including Internet telephony.

The companies acquiring a unified licence will have to obtain performance bank guarantees. The regulator has made it mandatory for the licensee offering national long-distance services to pick up the traffic of its subscribers in all service areas.

For international long-distance services, the existing roll-out obligations will continue. There will be no roll-out obligations for the class licence and the licensing-through-authorisation categories.

New Delhi: India’s public sector Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the largest telephone services provider, Tuesday announced a reduction of as much as 25 percent in domestic long distance phone tariffs.

According to the new rates, to come into effect from December 15, phone calls beyond 100 km will be charged at Rs.1.80 a minute, down from Rs.2.40 a minute now, said Pirthipal Singh, chairman and managing director of BSNL.

«We expect the traffic to increase with the latest reduction that will be available to all fixed-line customers, including public call offices,» Singh told a news conference here.

BSNL also unveiled its financial results for fiscal year 2002–03 Tuesday. The company said it posted a profit of Rs.14.44 billion and turnover increased by five percent to Rs.258.92 billion.

«BSNL registered impressive growth in turnover despite a highly volatile telecom market in India, which has experienced a major decline in telecom tariff,» said Singh.

The telecom behemoth spent a total of Rs.121.08 billion in 2002–03 on telecom network expansion in different parts of the country. It added 2.2 million fixed-lines and over two million cellular connections.

The company plans to install over six million telephones, including three million cellular connections, during the current financial year, said Singh.