Why they're all betting on broadband
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A qualitative change in the way India connects, is in the offing, as fibre on the ground and bigger international `pipes' propel it into a new high-speed era.
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LIKE THOSE fabled blind men feeling up the elephant, Indian players in the telecom arena have, each, their own `take' on what constitutes today's most misused buzzword: broadband.
Anything faster than the fastest telephone dial up connection to the Internet — currently peaking at 56 kilo bits per second (KBPS) — is broadband, say some, mostly Net service providers.
For our `wireless wallahs' broadband is WiMax, rather than its parent, Wi-Fi: in other words, unwired connectivity needs to be jacked up well beyond Wi-Fi's top 11 megabits per second (MBPS) before it can claim to be broadband.
In the real world, experience has shown that when Internet and network providers tout terms like `high speed', `broadband' and the like, the customer expects to experience at least 2-5 MBPS.
And this week, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has suggested that it is time to move beyond the dial-up-era speeds to something like 256 KBPS to qualify as a broadband supplier in India.
While the term `broadband' is recognised as the method of sending and receiving data over high-speed networks, its applications go beyond surfing the worldwide web. Indeed, some of the biggest customers of broadband are the corporates, who use it to fuel their intranets or dedicated private networks. . For lay consumers as well as enterprise customers, broadband means a tenfold increase in network speeds. And for India it comes, not a day too soon.
Nations whose Internet bandwidth is substantially — that means more than 75 per cent — broadband include Canada, Taiwan, Japan, US, France, Germany, UK, Italy, Japan and Korea. Korea has cent per cent broadband Internet.
Where are we in this broadband ballpark? Two broadband connections per 10,000, or 0.02 per cent. However, when it comes to the choice and variety of technology options to reach broadband connections to the customer, India is up there with the front-runners. The accompanying illustration suggests differing technology routes to the same destination — and India has exploited all of them.
In recent weeks the Direct to Home television business has finally become a reality. However, players like Hughes Escorts Communication Ltd (HECL) and its educational delivery arm, Direcway have pioneered the use of very small aperture terminals (VSATs) to make distance learning a seamless reality. Earlier this month HECL joined hands with Standard Chartered, Hutch and a few other partners to bring broadband access directly to the customer in 15 cities.
On the ground, Indian customers now have multiple options to the dial-up Internet connection:
* BSNL's Direct Internet Access Service (DIAS) delivers speeds between 128 KBPS and 2 MBPS at distances ranging from 2.5 kms and 5 km from digital telephone exchanges.
* Dishnet (its Internet business is now part of VSNL/Tata Indicom) pioneered the use of the Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology where a telephone wire delivers always-on Net connection even while normal voice calls are made. * Cable TV network has a lot of unused bandwidth and its use to deliver Internet was pioneered by players like Hathway, In2Cable, Sify and Asianet. However the cost of the special Cable modem has proved a disincentive and various players are still juggling pricing options.
* Another option that is being tried in housing colonies in many metros by new entrants like ZeeNext is to provide bandwidth in bulk via leased line to neighbourhood servers and then extend it to the individual houses or offices by Ethernet CAT cable.
* Sify Infoway led in proliferating the neighbourhood cybercafe, first with broadband wired connections and then with WiFi. Indians for the first time could wirelessly connect to the Net from their own laptops.
* On April 26, Reliance Telecom joined global players like BT and France Telecom to become the latest members of the WiMax Forum, a 98 strong partnership of telecom companies who hope to promote the new broadband wireless standard 802.16, which is theoretically capable of delivering connectivity at up to 70 MBPS and at distance of up to 50 kms compared to the 1-11 MBPS and few hundred metre range of today's widely used Wifi standard, 802.11b. Only other Indian member is Sify.
At the MAIT Conference last week, the documentation included an Consumer Broadband Report for 2004 prepared by Nagendra Technology Consulting (www.nagendra.com). It assessed the current `broadband' offerings in India but somewhere in the top right hand corner of the graph of network speeds versus installed capacity for every player, was a large white star labelled "Real Broadband". It was pegged at the 2 MBPS level. Every one of the Indian providers was below this threshold.
Get `real' guys! This is one Lakshman rekha we'd love you to cross.
Anand Parthasarathy
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