Rolling Out Broadband Internet, On The Cheap

Mathamota writes "The goverment controlled telephone company in the city of Kolkata (Calcutta), India is providing a Internet access service called DIAS (Direct Internet Access System) which provides 24 hour connection at 128kbps (when the phone is being used, it drops to 64). However, the best part is that the cost of Plan I (which has a data transfer limit of 500 megs) is only Rs 825 ($ 16.50) per month, all inclusive. The technology used in this stuff is quite interesting, and there is a whitepaper available at the site of the company which developed the system." At first glance, it sounds just like plain old ISDN; but after reading the white paper, it's a bit different. Cool idea.

Comments

Re:This is not very Cheap for most Indians

[doktor-hladnjak]

The cost of this is not inexpensive if you consider what most indians make at a yearly level. Not to mention the cost of the phone or computer. It's a step in the right direction.

Yes, this is really not cheap, even for people making good money in India. A friend of mine was telling me how a couple of years ago, he got an offer of around $750/month, right out of college for some sort of programming job. He said this was an obscene amount of money, not just by the standards of the average Indian, but also by other friends who had gotten IT-related jobs. He seemed to think it was comparable to making close to 6 figures in USD. I've had other friends say things like "multiply by 60" to get the idea of how much lower the cost of everyday items (food, clothing, etc) is.

So, the cost for this is something like 1/40 of even a well-off middle class Indian.

Re:Ok, someone is forgetting to think

[maxbang]

Rs is how Indians write rupees. Contrary to Western beliefs, rupees are not magical multicolored gems found in various pots/jars, held in a giant's wallet, or tallied in the lower right hand corner of a television screen.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[dissy]

*sigh* and slashdot JUST had an article on this in the past week.

> 128 kbps is hardly broadband

How do you figure based on that information?

Is a blue car fast?
Is a baby that crys tall?
Is a sharp knife long?

> 128 kbps is hardly broadband

128 kbps - this is a speed, measuring a type of bandwidth.
is hardly - this is (basically) a logical 'not'.
broadband - this is the type of carrier data is sent over.

You realize if a pair of wires uses a protocol to send both IP data and any other data at all that isnt IP, it is broadband, EVEN if the IP data can only be sent at 10 bytes per second?

The article describes this as having both phone/voice service as well as IP service over it.
Unless they are actually encapsulating one form of data over the other, like true ISDN does, then it is broadband. period. nothing about the speed comes into play here.

> "Broadband" means something different now than it did 5 years ago.

No, its always meant the same thing from when the terms 'broadband' and 'baseband' were made. You are just using it incorrectly.

Pricing..

[univgeek]

A lot of people seem to think that the pricing is too high. However, the target market - the middle-class/upper-class, could easily afford this. In my house the telephone bill (mostly due to net) comes to around Rs.2,500. I would jump at this opportunity, and so would almost all of my friends.

Now whether 128Kbps is broadband is a different argument, but it sure beats crappy 33.1Kbps, and there would be no per-minute charge!!

Slightly OT. The IIT (Indian Inst of Tech. ) decided a few years ago, that waiting for multi-nationals to bring in new tech that was cheap enough for use in India was pointless. The MNC's were used to at least $40 revenue per phone line per month, and that is what they were expecting in India. The IIT decided that it would go for lower-cost/lower-speed solutions using the latest in tech to drive the prices down, instead of increasing the features.

A famous anecdote that one of the Professors there likes to relate - Around the 80's , all the digital phone switches used in India were imported. Companies like Alcatel, Ericsson, etc. used to charge a hefty bundle for them. Then C-DoT (Center for Development of Telecom) stepped in and made their own digital switch for a fraction of the cost. Almost overnight, the MNC's were forced to drop their prices in order to compete. This is what Banyan Networks, and a host of other small startups, incubated at IIT, want to do in India.