Stills Serving from Those Foreign Lands

Not

quite déjà vu; this had happened before. A fellow panelist and a VSNL director

at a panel discussion in mid-May ticked me off for saying that India still had a

bandwidth crunch, with one-fortieth of China’s 20 GB Internet gateway

capacity. There’s no gap, he said, and no unmet demand; apply and you’ll get

bandwidth in a month. Two years ago I was told the same thing by a

fellow-speaker at another event, the then DoT secretary…no bandwidth shortage.

So how come all those Indian server owners aren’t flocking back into India

from Exodus, Data Return, et al in the US?

Well, a few are. Some financial sites, which need local control of their

servers, for instance. But most are not. The reality is in the numbers: Against

the 0.5 Gbps of deployed gateway capacity for India, US-based Indian severs,

including Indian corporate mailservers, gobble up 20 Gbps (our estimates).

Another few Gbps of traffic from India-based servers stays within India.

So why don’t they come back, if it’s cheaper here now? I asked some Web

companies, and they said: it’s not.

• Bandwidth is still expensive.
  
  Sure, VSNL rates have really dropped. But enterprises and data centers here
  
  have to factor in reliability and backup issues, which require multiple
  
  levels of backup in India. (With a VSNL leased line, our company had a
  
  person running around full time just to keep the line up. Forget 24x7: if
  
  the line dropped dead in the evening, tough luck. Private ISPs have turned
  
  in far better reliability and service scores, though performance issues
  
  plague them too.

• Other infrastructure costs also
  
  add up, notably electricity and the need for multi-level backups.

• India’s not close enough to the
  
  Internet backbone. Having a mirror or an India-only site here is one thing,
  
  but putting your only server in India for a global site is a no-no. (India
  
  can still make a bid for regional Asia hub–with a hundred-fold increase in
  
  gateway capacity.)

• ISPs, data centers and others
  
  face an uphill task: the challenge of service level agreements. Users
  
  getting 99.99% today will expect the same here.

Yes, things have changed in the past 12 months, and there’s fiber

everywhere. That has as yet made little impact. But as we approach the threshold

where it may make economic sense to move our Web servers into Indian ISPs and

IDCs, Web users will have to keep up a constant process of evaluation–and take

the plunge soon. And maybe I won’t have to get into the same argument a year

later with another telecom official…if India has enough bandwidth, how come

our servers are all abroad?

pkr@cmil.com