On 24/09/05 17:30 +0000, Dinesh Joshi wrote:
Hi,
I was just talking with a Swedish friend and I wondered what is keeping India from going broadband? I mean people in foreign countries commonly
The initial investment. If you want to hook up your neighbourhood with decent ethernet (100 Mbit symmetric, public IPs...), it will cost in the neighbourhood of 5K/household + the ISP license. Hooking up fewer subscribers will actually increase the per user cost.
Running cost would be your bandwidth to the Internet/number of users + marketing + salaries + overheads.
have 2Mbit connections without download restrictions. My friend is currently studying in a university where he gets to share a 100Mbps 24x7 connection amongst 3 people and the authorities don't care about the downloads, only the uploads :O And he says the fees are included in the university's fees. I personally have logged into his server and downloaded many things, just for fun ^^ and it feels great to download at those speeds from international mirrors!
Forget about 100Mbps. A friend in Netherlands has a 8Mbps DSL connection. No restrictions what-so-ever. The cost is very reasonable. In Indian rupees it works out to 1200-1500 bucks. I am not saying that
Look at Sweden/Norway/Japan/HK instead.
foreign countries are a haven for those who feel the need for speed, rather I am simply saying that the conditions are much better than India. This is a big fact that the internet sucks in India and despite whatever measures our IT / Telecom minister(s) have taken to improve the situation, it hasn't made much of a difference. I still see MTNL DSL being overly priced. Yes, the 200MB / 400MB or whatever limit they put sucks.
If you want to see any real improvements, you will have to bypass the telecom operators.
I can't see any *real* ISPs. Why is it so? Why is it so difficult for them to provide us with fast connectivity? Are the bandwidth prices so high that they cant afford to give us anything better? Are they just
Oh, bandwidth prices are fairly low. They just don't want to provide end users with low cost bandwidth, because a lot of people would move away from dedicated circuits (or would demand and enforce SLAs at the same price).
Feel free to get a few hundred/thousand of your neighbours together and start off a community ISP.
Alternatively, lobby the government to split the telcos into connectivity providers and service providers and allow equal access to the wires to all those who want it.
Devdas Bhagat