Why India.com Lives Abroad

Why India.com Lives Abroad

Dotcom

reality check. How do you measure progress in the Net age?

Not by exported engineers or lines of code. They

don’t describe progress within.

My first measure is the number of PCs in the

country. Sales crossed the one million mark in 1999 (IDC India). But we have a

long way to go in PC and phone penetration.

My top measure is bandwidth. The pipes within,

and gateways to the world.

I said this two months ago at a function: India’s

total Internet bandwidth (150Mbps) was less than a company’s pipe to Singapore’s

ONE network. The DoT Secretary said I was unaware of reality: "India does

not have a bandwidth problem, and never will."

But India does. It has a terrible problem. What

prevents things from collapsing is low demand growth. Now that’s a circular

argument. Without supply, demand is held down–or deflected abroad.

Take the dotcoms–where are their Webservers? In

the US.

First, there’s dollar outflow, as thousands pay

US-based ISPs for hosting.

Second, we miss out on a whole industry–hosting.

Can you imagine the demand for Webservers, bandwidth and app server farms if

these sites were located in India? The IT jobs?

Third, how crazy that sites for Indian users are

all abroad. We pay twice over–for hosting, and the consumer bandwidth! If they

were hosted in India, more traffic would stay home, reducing gateway loading.

Fourth, as ASPs push the hosting business up the

value chain, the dollar costs for Indian users will go up, with expensive

manpower running those app servers in the US.

Fifth, with usage focused on local servers on a

fast backbone, end-user response would be quicker, a critical factor for e-com.

Sixth, if our gateways are also expanded–think

of the opportunities for hosting foreign sites from Indian server farms. Imagine–India

as the Webserver location for Asia.

Let’s be clear about this–neither the $50

billion software export target for 2008, nor the IT-enabling of the masses, will

happen without bandwidth. What can the government do? Pull out all stops for a

10 gigabit backbone and 5 gigabits of gateway capacity by December. Drop

internal bandwidth cost fivefold–so much that it does not make sense for any

Indian dotcom company to host abroad. Encourage Webserver farms.

There won’t be a single paise lost (it’s

going out now–in dollars). It will make that $50 billion target possible, add

hosting revenues, cut forex outflow, bring the Net to a lot more people. And

bring India.com home.

Prasant

Kumar Roy