Advertisment

Relief from the Skies

author-image
DQI Bureau
New Update

Bandwidth has been a widely discussed topic in India in

recent times. On its availability hinges the country’s ability to realize the

dream of $50 billion of software exports, a $87 billion software industry and a

$140 billion IT industry by 2008. Today, the total bandwidth available to the

country stands at 320Mbps, routed through VSNL. This capacity is expected to

double by September. However, the country’s need, according to a Nasscom

report, stands at 10Gbps by the end of 2000, and is expected to go up to 40Gbps

by 2001. In view of this, Nasscom has put forward the notion that every

individual has a right to demand 2Mbps of bandwidth as a basic need.

Advertisment

The government has initiated steps to ease regulations and

facilitate the availability of bandwidth in the country. As many as 65 gateway

licenses have been issued through which submarine bandwidth providers can now

sell their capacities to users directly. Even then, the fact remains that India

will continue to face a scarcity of bandwidth till 2002. Says Sharat Jain,

country manager, India, Teleglobe, "Irrespective of the new capacity being

made available, India will be short of capacity by a factor of four till the end

of 2001. Things will improve by 2002 once new cable systems are in place."

Adds Harpreet Duggal, VP, sales and marketing, BT-Worldwide, "There are two

aspects to the bandwidth issue. One is the international connectivity, which

will not be available to us until the landing stations by submarine cable

operators come up. That can easily take up to 18 months. The other aspect is the

domestic connectivity which again is a scarce commodity."

In fact, it is this domestic scarcity where the bottleneck

lies. Although the national long-distance service has been opened up and players

have joined the race for providing capacity, none of them are geared up for

large-scale commercial deployment of their services in the near future.

In this scenario, if one decides to procure capacity from

submarine bandwidth providers, multiple landing points would be required, which

would be very costly. Besides, even that would be possible only in coastal

areas. Other places will continue to suffer because the capacity to those places

would be routed through domestic cables from the landing points.

Advertisment

The orbital alternative

Satellite gateways can be set up anywhere. "One

alternative solution is to allow the interconnection of VSATs to other

networks," says Rothin Bhattarcharya, managing director, Telecompetence

India. Installing satellite gateways close to an area of demand and then

distributing the capacity over the terrestrial cable can be a reasonable option

as it would be cost-effective and also help create a public network

infrastructure. In the long run, perhaps things would move to terrestrial

networks anyway. At present, however, such an approach would favor only big

corporates who can advantageously afford the expensive VSAT networks.

For ISPs, two factors favor the choice of satellite-based

international gateways in the short run. One, the time to set up, and

consequently the time to market. Two, the relatively low cost of the initial

set-up. Says Bhattacharya, "The roll-out of satellite-based connectivity is

quick and therefore a definite plus from the time-to-market aspect."

Advertisment

Moreover, below a threshold point, there is no difference

between the cost of the satellite bandwidth and that of the submarine bandwidth.

Says Jain, "It is only when huge volumes are purchased that the submarine

bandwidth cost becomes cheaper."

Satellites are increasingly being advocated as a clean

solution in the short run. Later, when general-purpose users migrate to the

submarine option, the role of satellites would become more specialized. Says

Amitabh Singal, president ISPAI, "Ultimately, satellites will be used more

as a back-up medium when more and more mission-critical applications go

online."

Cables are certainly superior in the latency aspect–the

time required to connect between two stations. Cables have an average delay of

100 milliseconds while in case of satellites it is 500 milliseconds. This aspect

of latency is especially significant when the transaction protocol is IP. So, as

we move to IP, submarine cables are likely to become imperative. But till then

satellites appear to be the most preferred choice.

Advertisment

Balaka Baruah Aggarwal



in New Delhi

Advertisment