India’s experience with broadband is a bit like the cricket team. Both look better on paper. Both have more potential than performance. And both have enormous money riding on them. This year may have been declared the year of broadband by the government, but in every other way, the targets look as distant now as they have been in past two years. Consider this: in 2005, the government announced a broadband subscriber target of 3 million. Two years on, it’s still a target.
According to the latest figures, India has just 2.3 million broadband subscribers. That translates into a 0.2% broadband penetration compared to 19.6% in the US, 20% in the UK and 32% in smaller countries such as Denmark and Iceland. Significantly, India has 39.5 million wireline telephone subscribers compared to Denmark’s little over 3 million. But broadband rollout — now a popular economic indicator — continues to be negligible.
If that sounds damning, there’s more. India stands right at the bottom on a list of 34 countries published by OECD. The list ranks countries in terms of the number of broadband subscribers per 100 people. This, despite all the noise around telecom and IT growth in India.
So, has broadband not taken off in India? The reasons are many — from the high cost of PCs to the lack of content to the failure to make BSNL share its copper infrastructure with others. But the biggest bottleneck is the total lack of vision on part of the department of telecom (DoT).
Despite having over 100 million PCs, 40 million Internet users and 70 million cable and satellite homes, broadband reaches only 2.3 million users in India.
Understandably, industry insiders pin the blame on a variety of reasons. “The unbundling of BSNL’s nationwide local loop has not happened. This is the primary need for broadband in India,” says IAMAI president Subho Ray. “The second biggest need is to make sure the universal service obligation fund (USOF) is allocated to all private operators, including ISPs,” he adds.
Currently, MTNL and BSNL are the only beneficiaries of USOF. Deeper broadband penetration can spiral India’s GDP growth and empower consumers beyond the metro cities.
The high cost of PCs and the lack of killer applications/content is another problem. The government’s current move to bar ISPs with a net worth of under Rs 100 crore from offering IP telephony goes against broadband penetration. Also, the current ban on allowing STD calls through net telephony is another deterrent. “Infrastructure (BSNL local loop) is not being unbundled, the regulations are so hard and the applications which can drive broadband growth don’t exist,” says Internet Service Providers Association of India president Rajesh Chharia.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Under_the_spell_of_Dell/Broadband_Pipedream_2_yrs_23m_connections__hardly_counting/articleshow/2503890.cms
Sunday, November 11, 2007
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