Saturday, March 31, 2007
What is it about Bandwidth in India?
I am cross-posting a bunch of posts I had made earlier this month on the Indian Economy Blog. This one is the first.
There is no shortage of hype about India's superpowerdom in IT and Telecom. However, the truth seems to be far from it. Why is it that there is not a single provider out there who is capable of providing decent broadband access, for instance? The prevalent logic seems to be that the only thing that matters is price, seemingly oblivious to the fact that some consumers may be price-insensitive when it comes to fast and reliable broadband access. The U.S. is not the model to follow, but even so, you could get 3-4 MBps thoroughput at any given time for $40 a month (Rs 1800 approx). I bet there's at least a million households in India that are willing to pay Rs 2000 a month to get decent access. I certainly would be willing to pay that much.
Instead, all you have are providers who claim to provide you high bandwidth, but then place download limits. What do you need 1 MBps for, if you can only download 1 GB worth? A single album from Itunes is about 700 MB, so what's the point? Surely, you don't need high bandwidth to check emails? If they give you unlimited download, they restrict your speed to 256 KBps maximum. So, what the hell are these guys thinking? Or is there some problem with the bandwidth available to each of these ISP's? It seems to make no sense otherwise, when there is an obvious business model in price discrimination, right?
I know the available bandwidth in India today exceeds 20 TB. The question is how much of this is lit. Does anyone know? Secondly, are there any ISP's out there that are actually providing high bandwidth residential access with unlimited downloads? I am sure lots of ZS readers would like to know, besides me.
There is no shortage of hype about India's superpowerdom in IT and Telecom. However, the truth seems to be far from it. Why is it that there is not a single provider out there who is capable of providing decent broadband access, for instance? The prevalent logic seems to be that the only thing that matters is price, seemingly oblivious to the fact that some consumers may be price-insensitive when it comes to fast and reliable broadband access. The U.S. is not the model to follow, but even so, you could get 3-4 MBps thoroughput at any given time for $40 a month (Rs 1800 approx). I bet there's at least a million households in India that are willing to pay Rs 2000 a month to get decent access. I certainly would be willing to pay that much.
Instead, all you have are providers who claim to provide you high bandwidth, but then place download limits. What do you need 1 MBps for, if you can only download 1 GB worth? A single album from Itunes is about 700 MB, so what's the point? Surely, you don't need high bandwidth to check emails? If they give you unlimited download, they restrict your speed to 256 KBps maximum. So, what the hell are these guys thinking? Or is there some problem with the bandwidth available to each of these ISP's? It seems to make no sense otherwise, when there is an obvious business model in price discrimination, right?
I know the available bandwidth in India today exceeds 20 TB. The question is how much of this is lit. Does anyone know? Secondly, are there any ISP's out there that are actually providing high bandwidth residential access with unlimited downloads? I am sure lots of ZS readers would like to know, besides me.
