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."

Comments

It's not free

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's not free

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks milhouse. Do you honestly think that anyone here actually thought that there was no source of funding for the project?
Come up with a term that concisely distinguishes between a pay-to-play broadband service and the act of offering a service at zero cost to its citizenry. Hey how about "free"?

Next time someone offers you a free beer why don't you refuse because you want paid professionals making your beverage products rather than volunteers. They're probably dumpster diving for hops and scrap metal to make the cans, huh? Don't ask where they get the yeast.

Re:It's not free

[sid0]

Yes, and that's the trouble. Rule #1: There's no such thing as a free lunch.

The government here in India wastes too much money on such frivolous ideas, and on services to political class (free travel, free elecricity, free telephone calls, you name it). In the end their luxury is financed by us, the middle class. Every year the rate of taxation is increased (a tax on "services" has gone up from 8% to 12.36% in the past few years), or an entirely new tax is added.

There's no other solution but to cut down on this stupidity and direct the money towards the poorest of the poor. There will be plenty of scope to reduce taxes afterwards.

Re:It's not free

[LeDopore]

So, what you really mean instead of "free" is "paid for through taxation".

The big question is "paid how much?" The three biggest expenses for big ISPs are:

1. "Last mile" connectivity
2. Advertising and promotion
3. Billing & accounting

With community- or government-provided networks, #2 and #3 go away completely, and most of #1 goes away too. Here's why.

Most of the expense of getting residents Internet connectivity comes from connecting up the last few miles to individuals' homes. ISPs could in principal do away with a wired "last mile" with the right wireless technology, but that would make it easy for people to share their connections and passwords with neighbours. Instead, ISPs are charging you a premium so they can keep you from sharing your Internet connection when they insist on using cable or DSL.

We're at the point now where the inefficiency inherent in having to advertise, charge for and segregate Internet service is greater than the inefficiency inherent in public sector projects, which means that financially it's better now to have government- and community-provided Internet connectivity.

Re:It's not free

[timeOday]

It's no more free than having police, roads, or congress.

You're right, but paying for something doesn't necessarily make you poorer. If it's a good investment, you get back more than you put in. India isn't doing this because they think websurfing is more important than clean water, they're doing it because computers are a big and growing part of their economy. This is a bold, competitive investment.

Broadband -ne Food

[Syncerus]

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.

Re:Broadband -ne Food

[eln]

There's an old proverb that relates to this. Something to the effect of "If you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. If you give a man free porn, he'll die with a smile on his face."

Re:Broadband -ne Food

[WrongSizeGlass]

Can you spell hypocritical? Um, H-Y-P ... dang ... can I hear it used in a sentence please?

Re:Broadband -ne Food

[Infonaut]

...you might want to help the starving people dying people in the street before you give them free prOn

How about the idea that by putting in a more modern infrastructure, more high-paying modern jobs will be created, and all boats will rise? By your logic, it was a bad idea for the TVA to provide rural electrification, because people in poverty don't need electricity, they need food.

I don't know that free broadband will have the effect the Indian government thinks it will. It may not even get built by 2009. But if the government wants to stimulate economic growth, it isn't an unreasonable component of a larger plan to make it easier to do business in India.

Re:Broadband -ne Food

[Falesh]

It's not quite as simple as that. India is getting a higher and higher GDP from the tech industry. If they pump money into that then the state will get more money to put into feeding its poor. If they spend the money on feeding their poor and none on development they will stay a poor country for longer.

Re:Broadband -ne Food

[Dazza]

Just having a wander through the streets of Delhi makes you realise how daft this idea of offering every citizen broadband is.

I was having a conversation recently with a well educated, wealthy, middle class Indian lady. She was telling me how high the average Indian wage was now. I was staggered at the figure she quoted, which, upon some questioning didn't include anyone not 'middle class'. Or, in other words, most of the country.

Something tells me this is the type of person who decided it would be offered to 'every citizen', for a suitable definition of 'every citizen'

There's a huge shortage of landlines for a start, which help the mobile boom ( again, for the middle classes ) and can be seen in the vast number of STD/ISD booths all over Delhi.

And this is just Delhi. Are they going to cable up Srinagar or Jammu in the next couple of years ? somehow I doubt it.

It's a laudable aim, but a dose of realism is needed I think

I didn't know you could have milli-bits per second

[LotsOfPhil]

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.

More Outsourcing?

[OakLEE]

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.

India's Priority Listing:

[tdmg]

1. FREE BROADBAND!!!!!
2. Feed our citizens
3. Nuke Pakistan
4. Restructure caste system
5. $1 taco Tuesday
6. AIDS prevention? ....

Service level will be poor

[Anonymous Coward]

For any company that sets up offices in India, bypassing the public telecom system is job 1. When you see a picture of big-wig executives showing off their snazzy India facility, see if you can spot the satellite uplink on the roof. Believe me, it's there.

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.

Re:not a troll...

[HellYeahAutomaton]

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.

Subsidized

[goldspider]

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!

Re:You know what this means?

[forkazoo]

The amount of Indian porn is going to increase exponentially.

How can a country that has infrastructure and famine problems in some areas (a recent study suggested 47% of Indian children suffered from malnutrition) manage to provide this?

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?

Indian Subcontinent

[oyenstikker]

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.

Indian Middle Class Population of America.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I see many postings about India should feed its starving masses first. First of all India has not had a famine since the 1964 Bihar famine.

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.