Slashdot Mirror
India To Offer Free Broadband by 2009
codecracker007 writes "The Government of India is planning to introduce free 2 mbps broadband for all residents of the Indian subcontinent by 2009. The expected service shall be launched by the government owned telecom operators BSNL and MTNL. Quoting from the article: 'The government proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL. While consumers would cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it.' The India Times has an extensive editorial on the decision. It must be mentioned that the Indian government and its autonomous regulatory bodies are very proactive in holding the consumer interests above the operators', managing to reduce the long distance and wireless tariffs by a up to factor of 20 in less than 7 years."
You can call it "free" if you'd like to, but I doubt that installers will work for free and manufacturers will make equipment for free. So, what you really mean instead of "free" is "paid for through taxation". It's no more free than having police, roads, or congress.
Uhh, maybe it's me and my misplaced sense of priorities, but you might want to help the starving people dying people in the street before you give them free prOn.
Of course, I could be wrong.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
So you get 2 mbps. I guess that means 1 bit every 500 seconds. 1 billion people in India, 2 million bits per second. That's not that tough, but I guess giving everyone somewhere to plug in would take some infrastructure.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
The article raises a few issues. The first of which is what level of connectivity are we talking about? Does "access" mean a line to every home, or just access to a line by every household. The former would be a boon to all citizens (especially those living in tenement slums). The latter isn't as impressive as one could establish this by having access to one computer in each village.
I think the greater issue, however, is the potential boon this might be to companies looking to outsource operations. One of the driving forces behind outsourcing is the penetration of cheap telecom into emerging markets. Here, you'd have a situation where companies wouldn't even need to pay for internet access to hire workers. They could just have them telecommute from home. If that's the case the amount of outsourcing could increase rapidly. It's a smart decision by the Indian government, as their investment would pay off ten fold if that were case. For the American engineer, though, this is perhaps not such a good development.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Free broadband will, of course, result in India becoming a richer country. I am happy about that.
1. FREE BROADBAND!!!!! ....
2. Feed our citizens
3. Nuke Pakistan
4. Restructure caste system
5. $1 taco Tuesday
6. AIDS prevention?
"Man, I am so unbelievably stupid."
If they go through with this, it'll be really cool. Maybe, before that, just one small change would make me really happy. I have a 'broadband' conncetion right now, and the speed is a blazing 256 kbps. That's because that's what our Department of Telecommunications has defined the minimum speed to be, for an ISP to call its service as a broadband connection. Disappointing, somewhat.
Btw 256 kbps is also the maximum they're offering in my area in my city, I can't even upgrade if I want to.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
My former employer built an office in India. The prices we were quoted for internet bandwidth were roughly 8X what we paid in the US. In the end, we settled for a quarter of T1 speed for about double the US price. In exchange for all of this, the throughput sucked. Packet latency and loss were simply miserable. The parent article's quote about "...regulators are very proactive in holding the consumer interests above the operators" is total BS as far as I'm concerned.
Power is free in India, which leads to overconsumption and underinvestment in the power grid. Politically, free power is untouchable, yet there is no money available to make it reliable. Anyone who truly needs power learns to generate their own on-site. The same holds true for bandwidth -- bring your own.
Technology arrives to the masses in a curve, the first being early adopters,
the middle being somewhat savvy people, and inevitably the the laggards.
By the time every laggard has access to the technology it will be an expected
commodity. A good example of this is the telephone.
If the broadband is "too hard to use", it wouldn't have ever taken off and made it past the early adopters.
Making technology a commodity is more important than trying to push out an education program.
How exactly does one increase competition by reducing the number of players? Please forgive me, but I am enormously skeptical of the ultimate purposes of this plan. At the highest level, this sounds very good. Many in India have benefited greatly as the benefits of telephony became available to them, especially the poor. However... This was not due to BSNL/MTNL. It was most recently due to a host of other players that dramatically lowered prices across the board for GSM phone and internet access. Mind you, there were many in India who decided to keep their original GSM phone service with these existing operators but who were simply thrilled at how Reliance and others forced prices to drop, and drop and drop. TRAI seems to swing back and forth between who's been more effective at getting their people/policies/desires in there (cough, cough, buying them off, cough, cough). The article seems to suggest the fight is now with the big, bad international carriers. But international calls have also dropped in price over the years due to competition. It's now actually cheaper for our relatives in India to call the US than the other way around. And the statement in the article about internet traffic routing outside India and back in seems hilarious. I'd really like to dig deeper into that claim. It's obvious traffic to well known websites outside India are going to cause that effect. In essence, this entire endeavor simply seems like a policy coup by the national operators to restore their position as the monopoly. Forgive me, but I'm very skeptical about their ability to perform here given their history. And I'm horribly concerned about the long-term effect of killing off competition.
I believe the term you are looking for is "subsidized".
Government is empowered by people who don't know the difference between subsidized and free. Thanks for doing your part!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
They got their priorities right.They think farther ahead.
The free internets are not for starving people.
60% of households in India do not have electricity yet according to Reuters. I assume they are going to have to wait for a massive electrification program before that is possible.
4 .htm
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N0723776
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Well, first off, America has decent connectivity. Not the best, but decent. I have something 4 Mbps to my current house, and 8 Mbps is an inexpensive upgrade. Some regions have fiber to the home at substantially greater rates.
Yet, when I walk around downtown Denver, I am constantly walking past homeless people who are asking me for spare change so that they can eat/buy booze that night to consume while sleeping on a sidewalk. Whenever some new technology intiative is announced here in the US, I never see hoardes of posters complaining about American priorities. I never see people in large numbers saying how we need to make sure that absolutely everybody in the country has food and shelter before we allow anybody to do anything else. Yet, whenever India has some technology initiative, it seems like a very substantial percentage of the comments are nothing but comments about how India needs to feed the hungry.
So, no country has no hungry people. No country has no homeless people. It's impossible to "solve" the problem 100% before doing anything else.
Second, how the fuck do you think India will be able to feed their hungry? They just magically decide it's a good idea, and everybody gets fed, and then everybody gets on with their lives all happy and dandy? No. They need to create an infrastructure where more people are more educated, and can do better jobs in order to grow their economy so that all those hungry people can get jobs and feed themselves. Internet access for everybody is potentially a huge step forward in this aspect. you know the old "teach a man to fish" wisdom, of course. Well, give a man efficient internet access and he can post fishing tutorials on You-Tube and teach everybody to fish. Not into fishing? Fine. Give a man high speed internet access and he can easily set up an online store to sell his rugs or hats or novelty oversized fingernails overseas. Anything you can sell overseas means money coming into the economy, the tax base growing off of foreign money, and more leftover money for homeless shelters.
See how this works?
You have NO IDEA what the costs of running a broadband network are! You left out
...and a bunch of things I'm not allowed to talk about
-My $1.4 million salary
-$2 - $7 million/yr in campaign contributions
-Dozens of attorneys to sue Vonage out of existence
Mateo LeFou, CEO, Verizon/AT&T
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Having said that, it seems that this is a case of a relatively small minority of religious fundamentalists getting their panties in a bunch over nothing. Most Indians didn't seem to have a problem with it. Of course he should have been more sensitive, but kissing someone on the cheek? Come on...
Of course, here in the US we also have small but extremely vocal groups of religious fundamentalists that make similarly ridiculous statements -- but generally, we try our best to ignore them, and the courts certainly don't side with them.
Pakistan is on the Indian Subcontinent. I am very surprised that India would offer free internet access to Pakistan.
Oh.
I am not very surprised that the story submitter made a statement that is not in the story, and the Slashdot "editors" did not edit it out.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Because the poor are numerous they are seen everywhere. Heart wrenching scenes of squalor abounds everywhere overwhelming the other part of Indian population. Half of India is on susbsitence level and two-thirds of India does not have any disposable income to speak of. That still leaves some 330 million people with disposable income, who form the middle class. That is bigger than total population of USA 300 million.
So let us not go overboard and think all Indians are dirt poor living in slums.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
At one time it was a cultural norm to enslave, whip, rape, and occasionally hang black people in the South.
Whether I agree with that or not, I guess it's not right, wrong, or absurd?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes they went nuts on it, no questions asked but take a gander at the video footage of the 'kiss' was more gere forcing himself on the chic with her trying to back out... couple that with the largely existant scarred psyche from the colonial era it doesn't take much to ignite the hysteria
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/29315.html
There is no such plan.
India's Minister of Communications & Information Technology recently launched the Re.1 OneIndia scheme where all telephone calls originating and ending in India (local and long distance, mobile and landline) will cost only Re 1. (2 Cents) During the press conference he was asked if a similar scheme is possible for net connectivity and he said the vision is to:
1. Start web hosting with MTNL and BSNL (The govt owned telecom companies) so that most Indian pages are hosted within India.
2. Once most Indian internet traffic terminates within India, reduce cost of internet connectivity in a big way, possibly even make it free.
When asked how long it will take to implement this, he said he still has 2 years to make something happen which is to mean the 2 years left in his term as the minister till the next general election.
There is no formal plan as of now and the story as posted on Slashdot is vastly exaggerated. Even the long goal in his comments was to offer free Broadband connection to subscribers with a land-line connection from BSNL or MTNL. Essentially, a free upgrade in competition against other providers.
There is no plan to provide internet connectivity to every person in India. I do hope, however, that someday it is possible to provide free internet access to every village for the vast benefits it could and would bring.
The thing is, if this is a wired connection we're talking about, it will benefit only the relatively wealthy. I.e., the relatively powerful. And if it's a wireless connection, then it's a lot cheaper than roads or electricity. And faster to build. (Consider cell phones vs. wired phones. Lots of countries appear to be just skipping the stage of wired phones, because it's so much cheaper and faster to put in cell phones.)
This may well be a reasonable use of resources. If you have a foot-powered generator, then charging the battery of a computer is reasonable, and if it has a wireless connection, then this will allow messages to get in and out, even when the roads are out. Could be important. IS relatively cheap.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.