The Power of a Fatter Pipe

Five
months ago on this page, I said bandwidth was the last frontier for Indian IT,
and that we needed a 10 Gbps backbone and a 5 Gbps gateway by year-end. Else all
Indian Websites would continue to host in the US, and we’d pay dollars to
visit our own sites. We’d lose out on the hosting and ASP industries and jobs.
And we’d miss out on a real IT revolution, while exporting all our manpower to
the US.

That editorial followed a panel discussion by our group publication Voice
& Data. One meeting later, Nasscom launched Operation Bandwidth in May,
projecting a 10 Gbps demand by year-end, against a 300 Mbps supply. It set a
target of 300 Gbps by 2005.

A big impact of all this has been the first signs of realization: bandwidth
is crucial for India’s economy. It’s the new-age electricity. It will change
how we live, work and compete in the Internet age.

Reality check: we are in the dark ages. Against China’s 55 Gbps and Japan’s
160 Gbps gateways, we have under 0.4 Gbps–less than a tenth of demand
excluding all our US-based Websites. Those would be in India if there were
enough cheap bandwidth: and then the demand would jump to well beyond 10 Gbps.

But corporate India has begun to realize the economics of bandwidth. Networks
took off when users figured they helped save resources and money. Now it’s
unthinkable to have isolated PCs in a company. Web-model apps are as inevitable.
Why replicate IT and human resources over 20 branch offices when you can do it
once, put that place online, and give the others PCs with Web browsers? Hotmail
showed how enormously successful Web-based apps can be.

The Government accepts the need for bandwidth. It’s set up a bandwidth
committee, and allowed ISPs to take bandwidth directly from global carriers.
That will take time to do from scratch, while VSNL sits on gigabits of
under-utilized bandwidth under exclusive contract with FLAG. It’s been asked
to renegotiate that contract, but monopoly-loving VSNL is very unlikely to do
that in a hurry.

There is change. It’s gradual, but it does look like bandwidth will ramp up
sharply in the months ahead–and Net usage will jump. If costs drop and a
multi-gigabit backbone links at least the metros, those dot-coms will come home.
And perhaps an e-mail to your colleague won’t have to go all the way to the US
and back, sucking up bandwidth twice over. The Website you access will be in
India, along with global sites. And we could be earning from the fatter gateway
and the services we offer, making India a true IT destination and not a body
shop. That’s the dream, and we have little time to make it happen.