Broadband Blog

Aptly titled “deluded government” by Atanu Dey, this is the “new initiative” planned by the mandarins sitting up and fantasising about the “free access” for millions. (He is still to write up a follow up post and I hope that he can find time to do so).

Atanu rightly points out that we would get to pay the “cess”. This might be similar to cess that we pay for the Universal Service Obligation fund- it has swelled up to 9000 crores gathering dust. And we haven’t seen any drastic increase in the telecom density so far.

The basic premise of “free broadband” is to encourage people to get hooked on to the “broadband” way of life. I believe that this is flawed in many ways. We as paying customers, are not getting our money’s worth. I have argued earlier that in purchasing parity terms, our telecom tariffs are among the highest in the world (Airtel cannot have revenues of thousands of crores unless they find ways and means to charge a hefty amount upfront). Apart from the notional crap about the booming telecom numbers, it is not feasible that the present infrastructure can hold up the increased numbers that would apply in the future.

A big bamboo up their butts for not being able to arrange for the required modems- there is a HUGE shortage of the crappy Chinese contraption that sits on my desktop. Imagine the situation if it becomes free!

Further, this is against the principles of free market economy. While I am all for upscaling the Broadband infrastructure, I hold this view that the prices should fall in line with the world rates and the bandwidth charges that the company pays for. This should include the marketing and customer acquistion costs and after sales service. The differential pricing needs to be introduced that anyone willing to pay for a higher download/upload speeds should not face a problem on that count.

One size does not fit all. While there is a huge cost of the roll out, it becomes easier to recover the cost at a later date. Specially when you could have value added services. We are all ready to pay but it should reflect the present realities!

Free Broadband would not ease the matters. I would any day prefer to pay for my access than rely on a “free service” because there would be no competitive pressure on the telecom company to service. Unless they sign the complicated Service Level Agreements. It would be a major legal issue too. How can we hold the service provider accountable when the product itself is free? As it is there is an issue with the paying customers. When it becomes free, the worst case scenario would unfold itself.

I haven’t read the media reactions to the same. Indeed, I became aware of the “free for all” Broadband from Atanu’s write up. I can bet on my private parts that the usual reaction would have to gush about it and hail the next “revolution”.

I hope that the idea gets scrapped. It makes no sense in the present scenario and would make it difficult for the discoms to recover their costs. It is anti competitive and for the first time in the history of blog, I am siding with the industry view point.