Broadband

Broadband revolution gathering speed in India

Special Correspondent

Though the broadband market is growing very slowly in India, and the residential market is quite small and the cost and quality of broadband services are high, the entry of new players in this field can change all that!

Today, about 40,000 route km (rkm) of optical fiber cable has been laid right across the country by these players with an objective of delivering better communications (voice, data and video) experience to their customers. Any medium (wire, optical fiber and air) that carries more than one signal is referred to as a broadband medium. Broadband is defined as the ability to provide Internet access at speeds of 200Kbps, more than four times faster than the 50Kbps speeds possible through conventional phone lines.

However, on the usage front, the broadband market is growing very slowly in India. The residential market itself is very small -- houses having PCs are still far and few. Though Cyber cafes are a good bet, those are not enough in numbers to support large-scale deployment. The bottlenecks for broadband in India remain the number of installed PCs and the cost and quality of broadband services.

Nevertheless, the 'fat pipe' or broadband revolution is on a roll in India. The unleashing of bandwidth has begun in earnest with an estimated $6 billion (approximately Rs 30,000 crore) investment. The players laying optical fiber cables across the country include Reliance, Bharti, Dishnet DSL, Teleglobe and government-owned organizations like the Powergrid Corporation of India, Gas Authority of India (GAIL) and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), BSES Telecom and the Indian Railways. Let us look at some other broadband technologies.

Cable, DSL, fixed wireless and satellite are considered key broadband technologies.

• Cable: With appropriate arrangements with a TV cable provider, one can attach a cable modem to the TV cable, attach the PC to the modem, and use the TV cable to get Internet service.
• DSL: Digital subscriber line (DSL) service puts additional channels onto a pair of standard phone wires. ADSL provides a 64Kbps channel for standard, two-way phone service. It sets aside two 64Kbps ISDN channels.

The two technologies are based on copper wires, telephone wires or TV cable and require that we live in a relatively urbanized area, within a few miles of a telephone company's central office or with cable TV available to us.

• Wireless: For those whose homes or places of business do not meet those requirements, there are two wireless (or mostly wireless) options to consider. Broadband wireless networks use a high-frequency radio technology called local multi-point distribution system (LMDS). The area, a broadband wireless service can reach from a single antenna, is limited to a few square miles, but antennas are relatively cheap to deploy.
• Broadband satellite: A small number of ambitious telecom companies plan multi-billion dollar constellations of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites that will deliver telephone and Internet services to most of the planet; but they are years away from reaching these goals. Hughes Network Systems (HNS) DirecPC currently offers satellite-based Internet service. By sticking a little dish on to the roof, information can be downloaded from the Internet at up to 400Kbps.

Cable will make more sense in urban areas. It necessitates minimal infrastructure changes and most urban homes are already wired for cable in India. DSL has distance restrictions that will make penetration difficult. However, fixed wireless could be the best alternative for India, if only the technology's reliability aspect could be beefed up. Fiber-optic cable could be used at the backbone, but bringing fiber-to-the-home (as in Singapore) is a costly and mind-boggling activity unless private investors take it up in a big way, with a lot of government support.

TANGIBLE BENEFITS OF BROADBAND SERVICES
With the availability of broadband services, the main difference will be in the deployment of value-added services such as audio/video streaming, Internet telephony, video-on-demand (VoD) over broadband. Vijaya Verma, co-founder of Alopa Networks, a broadband solutions company, said: "The discerning user will not only have much more flexibility in choice of services, but will also be able to dynamically activate services, and have usage-based billing. For example, he can request for higher bandwidth at a particular time each day, in order to run a streaming video application and can be billed accordingly. Currently, the user only has static services, fixed bandwidth and fixed quality of service (QoS)."

Ramesh Emani, CTO of Wipro Technologies, added: "I think broadband services will revolve around broadband Internet. There will be specialized Internet services tuned specially to customers for broadband access. Examples are Internet TV, video mail, movie-on-demand, etc.'' However, it is critical for the country to first get the necessary infrastructure in place. Verma suggested: "We need to install appropriate hardware and software in the ISP premises. There must be dedicated teams working -- from architecturing the overall deployment, to deciding the infrastructure, monitoring schedules, etc." Private companies can take this up, but it needs government support Perhaps, we should take a cue from Singapore, where fiber-to-home is a success story.

THE GROUND REALITY
Although everyone seems to be jumping onto the bandwidth bandwagon, confirmed reports on overseas connectivity through undersea cable are by two private consortiums, Bharti and Dishnet. These three put together are expected to add about 16Tbps of additional capacity, almost 300 times the current capacity available in the country. Mumbai-based Reliance Group has collaborated with Singapore's StarHub, Malaysia's Maxis Communication and Software Technology Park of India (STPI) to build a submarine cable linking India with Malaysia and Singapore. This move, to be implemented through group companies Reliance Telecom and Reliance Infocom, is expected to add about 3Tbps capacity. It will land in two places, Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh.

The New Delhi-based Bharti Group entity, Bharti Televentures, has roped in SingTel to bring a capacity of 8.4Tbps through the undersea cable, that is to land at Chennai. Chennai-based Dishnet DSL is laying a cable network with a capacity of 7.86Tbps between Chennai and Singapore. Currently, about 40,000rkm of OFC has been laid across the country by players such as Reliance, BPL, Shyam Telecom, Spice Telecom, Hinduja, Dishnet, etc. This is apart from BSNL's 150,000rkm of dark fiber which has been earlier laid across the country.

The Indian Railways has also announced plans to build a nationwide broadband telecom and multimedia network by laying fiber-optic cable along 62,800rkm of railway tracks by utilizing railways' right-of-way through the medium of professionally managed corporation, according to sources at the Indian Railways. The union cabinet has formed the Railtel Corporation of India to take up the task to modernize railways' train control operation and safety systems and networks. The project will cost Rs 2,560 crore and is expected to be completed in five years.

The Reliance Group has an ambitious plan to cover about 2,000 cities in the country with its fiber-optic broadband network, betting that it can lure a large number of people across the country into higher telecom and Internet usage. Mukesh Ambani, Reliance's newly appointed chairman, is reported to have said that Reliance Infocom is proceeding according to plan and there was no delay. He said, "We are trying to do in a short span what took the government of India 60 years." Reliance Infocom is laying 60,000km of fiber-optic cable across the country that will help it to offer various services ranging from basic telephony to high-speed Internet access. The Reliance Group officials say the network would cover about 1,500 cities, a figure that now seems to have been revised to 2,000.

B.V. Jagadeesh, chairman, NetScaler, network traffic-management tools firm said: "India's progress in executing broadband technologies has been very slow. The entire telecom penetration looks very weak as compared to the rest of the world. We need to take an aggressive approach in installations that can bring down costs dramatically and create more jobs.''