Broadband, an Infrastructure Challenge
Last week, the US government started exploring the possi- bility of a new Broadband Bill, and this prompted me to look at the status of our Internet connectivity is. The US mulls moving to a minimum speed of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) to each home and at least a gigabit per second (Gbps) to each university. I am not aware of any university, college or a corporate that is currently using 100 Megabits per second. India is one of the leading countries that develop and work as the backbone of information technology. But while the Internet penetration has grown and speed leaped forward, the way our Internet access has been growing is something to worry about. This week I try to explore what are the reasons I feel that the growth has been slow, and how we can make the growth speedier .
We all agree that the Internet connectivity to the masses, commonly known as broadband—defined as always-on-Internet—delivered to people has helped us grow the economy, our personal businesses as well as increase the reach and availability of information. Some of us will argue that there is still a digital divide and some will take the stand that though Internet tariffs are attractive, the speeds are not.
Internet was made available to the masses on August 15, 1995, through the Gateway Internet Access Service (GIAS) of VSNL. Back then, you could get a 14.4 Kbps going up to about 28.8 Kbps of Internet bandwidth, starting with a limited level of access shell account to the new age TCP/IP socket accounts. Then, you paid roughly about Rs 15,000 per annum for a 500-hour connection.
Zoom in to 1999 when telecom operators started realising the 56 Kbps that the dial-up Internet could reach was limiting their growth. New private players emerged with the first set of broadband services, at 64 Kbps unlimited, but you had to shell out anywhere between Rs 3,000 and Rs 6,000 a month depending on if you were a corporate or a home user; this is where the trouble started.
The Internet does not distinguish between a corporate or a home user; both use the Net to download content and to send information to other networks. But yes, the corporates were assumed to be heavy users while the home users were thought to be light. I could see why the price arbitrage was required back in those days, as roughly 97% of the servers that had content and email were outside India. Data needed to travel on international private leased circuits which would cost an ISP or telecom provider similar to an international call, making bandwidth expensive.
The sudden explosion in the dotcom space, a lot of development of applications and growth of service providers spun off entities that would host the servers in India. My company was one of them starting back in 1996, but we did not see content move to India until as late as 2004 when suddenly most of the large content providers started looking at servers in India to offer higher speed connectivity and a better experience to their website visitors. Also, in keeping with trends, the broadband kept redefining itself to a minimum of 128 Kbps. In 2005, the government of India mandated that for a service to be called broadband, it had to have at least 256 Kbps of interconnect speed between the customer and the point of presence. Another big mistake here.
The 256 Kbps of speed was defined as the capacity of the line between your house or office to the telecom/Internet service provider and not the Internet bandwidth available to you. The government suddenly realised that there was need to interconnect all Internet service providers and within themselves; they were not talking to each other. So, the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) was set up in 2003 and today, approximately 31 ISPs connect and exchange information at NIXI, which sadly does not go above 8 gigabits per second on any day. While NIXI backbone has been built to support up to 100 gigabits per second of traffic and stays underutilised, more and more bandwidth needs to be pushed to exchange points.
Most of the urban homes have broadband now, those who don’t still think it is too expensive or because they don’t see a need for it. Cheaper broadband will enable more and more people to connect to it, while faster broadband will enable doctors to monitor paitients remotely over the Internet (What we saw in 3 Idiots is just a glimpse of things to come—people are already using video conference to talk to each other, but the cost is still too high) and students take classes online. High speed internet means high quality video.
Companies such as BSNL and Airtel are at the high-speed frontier. Airtel has announced that the minimum speed of its broadband will be 512 Kbps. BSNL has a 24 Mbps plan, though it may not be easily available. But it is interesting to see a state-run operator coming out with the fastest possible broadband plan aimed at home users.
The ISPs need to drop the differentiation between a home user and a business user. The differentiation could be on the sharing ratios of services: business users end up buying Internet bandwidth as leased circuits, and pay as little as Rs 1.8 lakh per annum for a 2 Mbps link, i.e, Rs 15,000 per month for 2 Mbps, while a home user may get a 2 Mbps unlimited plan for as little as Rs 4,000 per month. It is the same bandwidth, but with different content ratios; while the corporate user will be able to peak up to 2 Mbps at all times, a home user may or may not peak depending on the loads.
The price war is taking place, new ISPs such as Tikona are changing the landscape and older players are entering new territories. But the unfair use of the term ‘fair usage policy’ needs to be looked at seriously. So, unlimited connection means there is no limit, but a *on the ‘unlimited’ signifies that there is a rider; people have billing hassles with the largest ISPs and tend to choose smaller plans, or stick to plans of limited speeds. The chicken-and-egg question of the content or the speed first needs to be answered at a time international connect prices are falling, more content providers looking at India and the country generating its own content. The content and the bandwidth seem to be merging and plans need to be drawn up for truly unlimited downloads.
Where do we stand today? The government is very supportive and ISPs have started talking to each other, but the premise that most of the content still lies outside India is not true. The other premise that international bandwidth is expensive also does not hold true any more. The world’s leading connectivity companies such as Teleglobe Network, i2i Networks and Flag are owned partially or fully by leading Indian telcos such as Tata Communications (formerly known as VSNL), Bharti Airtel and Reliance, respectively.
The premise that content is out of India is changing at a high speed. Though telecom operators need to focus on interconnectivity within each other and setting up peering/exchange points, they are still trying to outsell each other in terms of bandwidth. An archaic law such as the one stipulating content providers will not be allowed to peer with NIXI creates its own headaches. Today, a company such as Google has to come in and set up its servers at all three major telecom providers (Bharti Airtel, Tata Communciations and Reliance) while they could easily plug into the NIXI and be available to all Tier-1, Tier-2, and Tier-3 ISPs. We need to review the opportunities in the infrastructure segment and enable the growth of the Internet.
My request to the government would be to expand speeds in multiples of megabits per second, and let private exchange points come into the picture. It is in the interest of Internet service providers to connect with each other. I agree that they are competing but interconnects at independent levels, similar to what happens on the telephone links, would help the market mature and take a different shape. The definition of broadband if expanded to minimum 2 megabits per second will help increase penetration and expand use of the Internet beyond the casual use of checking email, updating Facebook status, watching live interactive videos, being part of global conferences and creating more and more content.
Broadband is an infrastructure challenge. It has been a long time that it was a demand and supply game. From now, the goal should be getting more people online and the price and speed mixture correct. We have come a long way and the growth has been amazing, but going forward, we need to enable leaps in megabits per second, and not kilobits per second. Rural areas lag not because there is a digital divide or there is no need of broadband there. It’s just that players have not reached this market as yet. The government has announced schemes, but there is a need to have content. Your average Web hosting company still wants to put up its servers outside the country as it is cheaper. But this flow of servers outside not only moves our content outside, but also precious dollars other companies earn. The more content is local and the more content is generated, the more impetus will it generate.
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The Above article appeared in the Financial Express, on Thursday 25th March 2010
Smart Devices – How are the Cell Phones Evolving
I remember a time when the phone was a phone, and all you could do was make calls with it—that is, if it worked. Cellphones changed all that, not only did they work (well at least back then they did) but were bought on a simple pretext—what do you like. If it had a game and having a colour screen was a big thing. And then, suddenly, something happened—the cellphone transformed into an intelligent device, and you could now download software applications to do more with your phone.
I remember when Symbian just came out and all the rage was to get the Opera browser working on the phone and get on the most sluggish GPRS connectivity and be happy that you reached a Web page. Symbian also brought along with it headaches, of phones crashing, not performing well, acting up on you and getting infected by virus, though most technology pundits at that time ruled that we will go back to non-smart phones. But today, the market is crowded with smart phones.
Buying a phone is no longer about the brand or the looks—it’s also about what it can do and does it have applications. Some ask, does it have an app store. Others say let them backup the phone online to their servers so that whenever they change the phone (be it dead or lost), just switch on the new phone, punch in a few buttons and get their data back. It can’t be more complicated than it is now.
It is a confused state of mind, with smartphones from Blackberry that run the Blackberry OS, some phones supporting Windows Mobile (6.1 and 6.5 are currently available and the 7 is coming out), Symbian, Linux, or plain simple Android. Most users today go in for what the phone looks like and try to stick to the same brand and family of phones for fear of retraining themselves and having a comfort. Only the tech guys go in and ask for platforms. In an opinion poll that I did with a few retailers and some people known in the mobile industry, the focus is very basic at the end of the day to get a phone that is easy to use as a phone, both for single-origin calls and conference calls, to be able to do email and messaging well.
Blackberry has started to emerge as the winner. It is one of the most stable phones in the market when it comes to a smart phone, also because of the reason that applications on this platform available to the end user were limited and you really could not infect a Blackberry out of the box. The lovely interface and inter-operability with any personal computer operating system has given it a winning edge.
Though still the most popular platform in India seems to be the Symbian OS Phones, the currently defining market share of one operating system versus others is really not possible. Closed operating system phones such as the iPhone have also picked up market momentum. People still end up choosing phones on preferences such as how good the camera is is the GPS worth it; how much capacity is the data card; does it have a touch screen; a big screen, can one listen to music on it; does it have an FM radio, etc.
The phones are now becoming application centre pieces, with data being the next revenue for telecom operators. After all, with the current and future falling rates of voice calls, the average revenue per unit (ARPU) does not make any business sense to operators.
Microsoft recently announced its Windows 7 Mobile operating system, though most of the phones that had Microsoft Windows 6.1 Mobile Edition never even came out with Windows 6.5 in India. We will have to see if the Windows 7 will really make an impact.
Due to its openness, Android has a lot of people making some great applications. Even the team at Google, and the Open Handset Alliance backing it, are creating a great set of location-specific applications, and also changing how you interact with the phone. From a point where the phone was a 12-key numeric touchpad, and changed to touch screens, hybrids and then multi-touch, the next frontier is to talk to your phone either through voice, or use pictures for it to do your work. Android takes a huge leap in it.
And then there are captive operating systems, owned by companies such as Samsung, Nokia and Motorola which are run only on their devices. These phones perform marvellously in terms of basic telephony and messaging, but stick to very simple applications. A set of people wants to stick to phones that are only phones. To people looking at a phone that can replace their camera, MP3 player and gaming device, look at the smarter phones.
Linux the other open operating system, has been chosen by a lot of players; Motorola brought in a Linux phone that had partial success. Some other players had their own Linux variants, but Nokia funded a software platform called Maemo that is based on Debian Linux. Though the operating system is more targeted towards tablet computing than phones, there have been mixed reactions to its success. At the Mobile World Congress in February this year, Maemo merged with Moblin to form MeeGo. It is expected to generate a lot of interest. A not so well known platform called Brew from Qualcomm is taking shape. With already more than 18,000 applications on the platform and 1,200-plus handset models already out there, this is going to take the feature-rich, low-cost phones mainstream.
It is the best time for developers. Now you can write an application for the platform you like and there is a wonderful SDK that lets you build out some interactive applications. With the iPad here in a few weeks, development on the Apple platform is increasing. What lags it that both the phone and the iPad will be closed devices and can only have application access from Apple-owned stores.
Linux developers were stuck with the kind of applications they could develop on the mobile Linux platform. That is also one reason that phones such as the A910 were not very succesful, but the MeeGo platform offers more opportunities. Symbian and Java have been leaders in their own ways, though limited options were available on what the apps could look and feel like. But the way Symbian OS has been adopted and if it maintains a good speed, it will remain the chosen smartphone OS for many manufacturers. The new look on the Windows 7 Mobile phone is very interesting for the user to develop and a large Microsoft development community should come out with some good looking applications, but how much and when is still a bit unknown.
With cheaper operating systems such as Android, MeeGo and Brew, handset manufacturers will be able to offer application- and feature-rich phones, that have different OS. Some manufacturers like Brew will allow you to change the OS on your phone and use their apps. The market is still evolving, and it is difficult to say who will emerge as the winner, but for now, I would rather stick to a stupid simple phone.
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The Above article appeared in the Financial Express, on Thursday, 4th March 2010