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A little while back, Rajesh Jain had run a “Big Idea for India” contest. He has touched on many issues in his previous posts; there was a lack of serious debate on Broadband. This contest was open to all; I had mailed my entry to Rajesh on his email.
He had received over 150 responses for the same.

Jain announced the winners recently; in which yours truly has also figured (the names are in an random order). The contest was judged by Jain and Atanu Dey (whose blog is linked to in the blog roll in side bar). Of course, he has been a huge influence in shaping up my thought process and I owe a lot to him.

The post, in it’s entirety follows here. For the regular readers, there is nothing new because I have already touched on these issues in the previous posts extensively.

This is one answer and highly underrated option. The following scenario is envisaged:

1) Optic fibres running across to get the data without caps. We need fibre to home instead of outdated copper. Last mile access is contentious; while opening up last mile for private players is contentious, this needs to be debated. Britain has opened it up under strict regulations and British Telecom has been forced to upgrade it’s infrastructure to retain customers.

2) Heavy public investment for scalable architechture. Not 3G guzzling up spectrum but community Wifi’s (pay per use or perhap involving the municipalities making the people accountable directly for the level of involvement).

3) Create an ecosystem of open source applications to harness ideas; make it easier for people to access services. (Open Source standards promote interoperability; closed source is meant for perpetual profiteering at public’s expense).

4) Opening up the Government’s accumulated data through API’s etc; create models around it. For e.g., data from GPS installed in public transport would easily display the estimated arrival time through SMS if needed on the mobile phones. (“Hacker culture” is missing in India; most of the Bangalore flotsam is moronic army of debuggers and script kiddies).

5) Teleconferencing would make it easier for people to people contacts; Gujarat has shown the way! Why can’t India have something similar to Skype? (There is a move to have something similar in the GNU world where encryption would be based on open standards).

6) Education sector would get a boost; not only invite faculty, stream educational videos, hold tele-sessions but teach kids for a wonderful world of Internet. (Pilot experiments in Bihar/Gujarat have been well received; the idea needs scaling up).

7) Spin off benefits from e-commerce applications.

The potential is huge; if you are planning it to share with BJP, the easiest way out is to break the ISP‘s monopoly, hold TRAI responsible for execution (not DoT) and revise Broadband definition to at least 2 Mbps (UNLIMITED, WITHOUT any caps).

Thanks Rajesh!

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First, the version of Deepak Maheshwari, Secretary ISP association- he argues effectively for local loop unbundling.

“While Trai recommended unbundling of the last mile for broadband, the Broadband Policy stated that “last mile copper loop is not a ‘bottleneck facility’ for broadband services”, though it recorded that about 7 million copper pairs of the incumbent were suitable for broadband”

Broadband policy is flawed and utterly so. How can the likes of Maran claim that last mile isn’t a bottleneck? Assinine to say the least.

A chilling thought here:

“So far, less than 4 per cent of these have been put to use for broadband.”

Finally, the strong arguments for unbundling:

“Unbundling has not only ensured more choice to the end-users but has also enforced incumbents to be more agile and responsive to customer needs. Everywhere — in countries such as Japan, the UK, France and even Korea (the poster boy of broadband) — broadband access was accelerated thanks to unbundling.

Specially in UK, the unbundling has forced the incumbent British Telecom to shape up- BT is more or less like our own BSNL- worse off in some regards. Interesting to see as to how the brits left their legacy in more than one ways! Including this blog which is being written in English!

However, the current crop of ISP’s have been treated with disdain by the entrenched interests. There have been regular denials of connectivity and high access charges. Who else? Tata owned VSNL and our poster hate boy- BSNL. Surely, there is enough muck in the corridors of Telecom Department.

Now for BSNL’s retort- it reads like a press release. If you read closely enough, there is a tacit admission that much of the copper loops are useless. Testimony to the fact that BSNL has been extremely slow in upgrading it’s network.

A common tactic used to deflect the attention from the issues is to use “falutin”- thats the English term for “high sounding words”. For example, some of it is “World class“, “scorching pace“, “customer delight“,”fastest growing“,”cheapest“,”state of the art“,”high speed internet“( ha ha who guessed it?).”economic tool“,“millions of customers“…..

Readers are requested to add some words of their own.

Anyway, look at what R L Dube Director, Planning and New Services has to say about it. And how he falters in his own self belief. He has no idea about what broadband is and how it is accessed.

First salvo.

It crossed the 2-lakh subscriber base in nine months of its launch and is now adding an average of 4,000 customers across the country on a daily basis. By December 2005, we are sure we will cross the figure of 5 lakh( Whom are you kidding Mr Dube?)and by the end of the fiscal the target of one million.

Prepare yourself for a good laugh guys. This isnt me but the Director of Planning BSNL is saying. If we have “intelligent folks like these”- we surely know why BSNL is one of the worst telecom companies in the world.

“Broadband has to work on copper cables in the present network. It needs a computer with Pentium 4 and above and also a sound operating system.”

Sad reflection of the standards surely.

Another admission of BSNL which is loud and clear.

“And, instead of the existing billing system, a better state-of-the-art, transparent and customer-oriented system will be in place. We are sure it will do away all with all billing-related doubts.”

Nowhere in the article is mentioned that Mr Dube’s views are personal- this means he is speaking on behalf of BSNL.

A word of advice to BSNL. Kindly have knowledgeable people to defend your view point. If you can’t provide a decent service, have those people to speak for you who have some degree of intelligence.

How can they claim that broadband can’t run on computers other than Pentium 4? I am using an AMD- so sue me!

It’s the pits for sure and we have become the laughing stock of the entire world. Imagine. A director of a telecom company claiming such a thing about it’s services.

This is one post I couldn’t resist to highlight.

256 kbps which drops to slower-than-dial-up-speeds.This is BROADBAND INDIA for you guys

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