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 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 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.
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 lazy? Are they just plain stupid? How are these ISPs "billed"? What are the costs they incurr? I think now TATA, Reliance and other Indian players own major underwater submarine cables, so they should be able to ease the congestion and provide super fast connectivity! What gives here? I read some where that TATA bought Tyco and Tyco's underwater submarine cables' _unlit_ capacity was some Terabits! Reliance purchased FLAG telecom. It too has a huge network and a huge capacity! WTF? India, as a *whole* uses some few hunderd Megabits of capacity and here we have terabits of capacity! Why are lagging behind then? I wan't some answers and I think you guys are best equipped to answer them.
Are we really an IT super power? Or are we living a dream?