Broadband Penetration to sky-rocket soon

The Indian government is planning to introduce ‘broadband-over-power-lines’ (BPL) or powerband in order to boost broadband penetration and internet connectivity within residential areas throughout the country. This technology will enable fast-paced broadband internet access at residential homes.

 

The Indian Government’s Department of Information Technology has a separate broadband development wing and it has been in the news that the wing is making efforts to cut down the need for installing a transmitter every three meters and is scaling up the process so as to install only one transmitter every 300 to 500 meters. The DIT has received a proposal from the Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) in this regard.

 

Justifying the same, a DIT official said:

 

“We have received proposals from some of the leading technical institutions in the country in this regard and the department would allocate some funds to the institutes for carrying out the research and development work to promote broadband penetration,”

 

Broadband penetration through BPL lines will increase internet connectivity drastically as internet access will be now possible through ordinary power lines. The only requirement will be to plug a BPL modem within the building to be able to use broadband internet access at home.

 

The step taken by the government of India to spread the availability of the internet to every nook and corner of the country is extremely possible as it would definitely aid in infrastructure creation, solving of logistical problems and bottle necks, increased interaction and communication between different parts of the country which may affect business and hence directly aid economic growth.

 

A few things that the Government may have overlooked and needs to ensure are that:

 

Even if the Internet is available across the country, will there be a device available to access it on? Maybe the government should look at players like Novaltium who aim to increase PC penetration by lowering overall costs (which they plan to do by having network based CPU’s).

 

The government also needs to consider what kind of data transfer speeds and bandwidth speeds can be supported by BPL.

 

One also needs to consider the constancy of power cuts in our country and whether these power cuts would result in ‘Internet cuts’ as well (my guess is that they probably will think about this first).

 

The Department of Information Technology (DIT) needs to consider a few questions before they go ahead with the plan:

 

While using the existing infrastructure to help boost internet penetration is a commendable idea, the DIT can also look at other alternatives such as Wi – Max which has a point to point range of up to 400 km. To then make wi – max accessible (as most PC’s today do not have Wi – Max cards), the Wi – Max waves can be converted to Wi – Fi at the point of usage. Granted that there are a few concerns about the stability of Wi – Max, it is quite clear that it is the technology of the future with respect to Wireless Networking. One may even find that as the technology matures, it would become more cost effective than the plan that the DIT currently wishes to pursue.