[1st-mile-nm] Broadband to go free in 2 yrs in all of India to everyone

[Dewayne Hendricks]

[Note:  It looks like exciting things are in store for India as far  
as broadband is concerned.  So where is this kind of bold thinking  
here in the U.S.?  DLH]

Broadband to go free in 2 yrs
JOJI THOMAS PHILIP
TIMES NEWS NETWORK


[ THURSDAY, APRIL 26, 2007 02:00:26 AM]
<http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Broadband_to_go_free_in_2_yrs/ 
articleshow/1955351.cms>

NEW DELHI: The government proposes to offer all citizens of India
free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-
owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL. While consumers would
cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as
we know it.
You have heard of free municipal broadband — many cities in the US
have drenched themselves in wireless broadband connectivity which is
freely accessible to residents. The idea is to boost economic
activity in general. The government of India plans to achieve free
broadband connectivity at a speed of 2 MB per second across the
country, with a similar goal. Senior government officials expect to
be able to achieve this goal spending only a portion of the corpus of
the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).

All telecom operators contribute 5% of their revenues every year to
USOF. It is estimated that the unutilised sum from the USOF has
touched Rs 9,194.12 crore by March, 2007-end.

The current technological trend is for voice calls also to shift to
the internet, using voice over internet protocol (VOIP). The quality
of VOIP calls, patchy to start off with, has been improving steadily
over the years and by 2009, is likely to be as good as current
analogue calls that establish a circuit between the calling and
called parties. When that happens, revenue streams from calls would
dry up and telecom companies would need to develop value-added
applications to make money from the connectivity they provide for
free or virtually free.

The department of telecom (DoT) will be taking a series of steps to
make its plans for free broadband a reality. These include, using the
USOF to set an extensive optic cable network across the country,
opening up the long-distance sectors to further competition, allowing
free and fair access to cable landing stations, permitting the resale
of bandwidth, setting up web hosting facilities within the country
and asking all internet service providers to connect to the National
Internet Exchange of India (NIXI).

With international bandwidth rates in India being between two-to-five
times higher than the global standards, the DoT will also go all out
to break the monopoly of existing national and international distance
players in a bid to induce cut throat competition in this sector.
“India has only a handful of NLD/ILD operators while small countries
such as Singapore and Taiwan have over 30 and 60 long distance
operators respectively.

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Broadband initiatives: Speed it up
TIMES NEWS NETWORK

[ FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 2007 12:00:01 AM]
<http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/ 
Broadband_initiatives_Speed_it_up/articleshow/1962328.cms>

The government’s reported proposal to provide free broadband access
is a good idea, it would enhance economic activity and boost
productivity. It must, however, simultaneously speed-up 3G rollout
and facilitate convergence, enabling telecom companies to provide
value-added services to make up for the loss of conventional internet
and voice business, which is likely to shift in a big way to the
internet over the next few years.
At first reading the government’s proposal to provide free broadband
access by 2009 through BSNL and MTNL appears to be the usual arm
twisting of state-owned companies into populist unviable schemes. On
the contrary, the details show it to be a logical outcome of a series
of measures that would reduce the cost of providing broadband access
to almost zero in two years.

In that sense the free broadband scheme would be almost akin to
BSNL’s ‘One India’ scheme that forced private operators into offering
similar plans and thereby reduced telecom tariffs. The government has
already initiated bidding for the creation of universal service
obligation fund (USOF) supported independent mobile infrastructure in
rural areas, and provision of rural mobile services.

Since the initial results have shown the burden on the fund to be a
lot less than expected, it makes sense to use the near Rs 10,000 fund
to plug the telecom infrastructure holes. And this is exactly what
the government appears to have decided upon. It wants to use the fund
to create a pan-India fibre optic network and encourage web hosting.

In conjunction with other measures such as allowing more long
distance players and routing all internet traffic through the
National Internet Exchange of India would encourage competition and
keep internal internet traffic within India, precluding unnecessary
use of bandwidth. This infrastructure initiative and increased
competition would make free broadband viable.

However, much of this depends on the spectrum riddle. The government
must quickly decide on the modalities of 3G rollout and the spectrum
issues, as 3G is essentially high-speed wireless broadband and the
key to providing internet services in remote areas.

The policy should provide for an efficient utilisation of the scarce
resource. In that sense government’s thinking on permitting bandwidth
resale and allowing new players to bid for spectrum is welcome. It
would infuse competition and thereby help lower costs.