The arrival of bandwidth will revolutionize our daily lives
in the new millennium. It will enable us to conduct a whole
range of activities on the internet, from business to entertainment.
High and inexpensive bandwidth forms the bedrock of all new
technologies which are now redefining the new economy.
The Indian software industry, which continues to grow from strength
to strength, is expected to move into new fields of e-commerce,
e-technologies, Wireless and WAP-enabled services and provide
a power house to the global infotech industry for leading edge
developments. All this is critically dependent on the availability
of high quality and inexpensive international access and bandwidth
The Bandwidth Paradigm:
There has been tremendous activity in building powerful networks
for intercontinental and national backbones based on optical
fibre cables. A series of submarine optical fibres have come
in with capacities which have grown 10 folds with each generation
of fibres. Today's technologies deploying WDM (Wavelength Division
Multiplexing) allow each wavelength to carry upto 10 Gbps and
one fibre pair can carry upto 100 wavelengths giving a fibre
pair capacity of 1000 Gbps.
All these ground breaking technologies have had a tremendous
bearing on domestic and international pricing of telecommunications
and connectivity services. With the availability of high bandwidth
on a host of cables, international bandwidth rates have plummeted
steeply.
VSNL has slashed the prices of its international private leased
lines and international internet leased lines, with the cut
amounting to 75 per cent of the original prices. This move is
intended to foster the growth of the IT industry in the country
and align India to the global environment. The new bandwidth
pricing will redefine the IT industry and the IT enabled services
market in India. This new pricing scenario also opens up new
opportunities for cable operators and value added service network
providers to bring bandwidth to the home via broadband media.
Internet in India:
India has adopted a very open ISP policy. Today, more than 300
ISPs are licensed in the country and over 100 international
gateways have also been allowed to be set up. The number of
internet users in the country is estimated to be above 3 million
with over 1.5 million actual Internet accounts in operation.
In India, the falling cost of international internet connectivity
will facilitate a new growth curve of Internet. It will also
open a new era of broadband Internet connectivity being provided
direct to the home. The law of locality ordains that the network
traffic is 80 per cent local, 95 per cent continental and only
5 per cent intercontinental. This, of course, indicates that
to take advantage of the new international pricing, the domestic
connectivities and their prices will have to be correspondingly
matched to take the real benefits to the users in the country.
We are at the beginning of a revolution, which is being powered
by unprecedented growth in telecommunications capabilities and
dawn of a new era of service and knowledge industry in the country.
(Source: Economic Times)
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