India will connect all its 600,000-plus villages by telephone within two years when it will boast 250 million lines, Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran said Tuesday. "We have visualised that by 2007 the country will have 250 million telephones and the tele-density will be about 22 percent. By then the entire country shall be carpeted by telecom network and all the villages connected by phone," he told a press conference.
Some 180-200 million of the phones would be mobiles, he added. Maran said the number of Internet connections was expected to more than triple to 18 million from 5.45 million over the same period. India opened its telecom sector to private players in the late 1990s, attracting a host of global and domestic players who have flooded the market with services and pushed the total number of subscribers today to 100 million.