India : Still stuck in the kbps universe
I happened to read an article about the state of broadband in the US a couple of months back . Here are a few excerpts.
Verizon’s new broadband service, FiOS delivers a super-fast connection by replacing the old copper phone line to each home with a fiber-optic cable, offering Internet downloads as fast as 30 megabits per second, vs. the 1 Mbps to 6 Mbps of the typical cable or DSL broadband line .
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts recently demonstrated a new technology called DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) that promises to give cable modem users speeds as high as 150 Mbps .
And this more recently from a Swedish news website
“Sigbritt Löthberg’s home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link “.
Sadly life in Bangalore is not as good , I have to pay $23 for a 256kbps line , It took me 3 days to download Fedora core 7 . All this after the former I&B minister declared 2007 as the year of the Broadband (read fraudband). There are plans for speeds upto 2mbps but they come with a download limit of 1Gb .
Probably the government doesn’t understand that from an economic growth standpoint, broadband is crucial for India’s future .US based venture capital firms are investing huge amounts of money in Web startups and India seems to have stalled on the broadband front. There is no dearth of a fibre backbone for providing better service as Reliance and the Tatas are in control of huge bandwidths. Reliance Communications, Bharti, BSNL, Gail, Railtel and PowerGrid and VSNL have their own fibre networks. Reliance Communication has a 60,000-km network and VSNL over 40,000 km.
BSNL and MTNL are mostly to blame as the two state telecom operators refuse to share their last mile networks with the private sector and instead are hell bent upon providing third class service on their copper based networks .
I think its high time that the government woke up to this reality. For a country which has the highest number of young people in the world this is absolutely pathetic .