Chances are high that the e-mails that you send to your colleagues in the country, will first move on to a US-based server before being routed to your colleagues’ mailboxes. The same is true of Indian Web sites. Click on a supposedly Indian site and there is a high probability that the same request will be routed to some US server. Statistics point out that out of over a million Indian Web sites and domain names, a meager 1,600 are hosted from India.

In India, it is the international Internet bandwidth that has been hogging the limelight. Be it Nasscom or Frost and Sullivan or general media reports, the culprit usually has been the international bandwidth for almost all of India’s Internet problems. Nasscom has predicted an international bandwidth of 10Gbps by the year-end. Amitabh Kumar, director (operations), VSNL, counters Nasscom’s claims of 10Gbps bandwidth by the year-end. Says Kumar, "Nasscom’s figure of 10GB pertains to the total connectivity in the country including that of domestic backbones." So the real issue is not
international but the domestic bandwidth.

No NIB

AT&T and Qwest in the US or BT in the UK have invested massively in building up the domestic Internet infrastructures in their respective countries. Also, Asian states like Malaysia and Singapore are way ahead compared to India. Singapore has deployed an ATM base broadband multimedia network, which will help the country become a major IT hub for the Asia-Pacific region. Malaysia is following its neighbor’s footsteps. The country has developed a multimedia super corridor by linking 12 of its cities through a 700-Km fiber optic backbone of 2.5-10Gbps. Access is provided to home and office through optics.

It is not that we have not thought about the same. As late as 1997, India had launched its own national Internet backbone with fanfare. The task of setting up a much-hyped national Internet backbone was given to the DoT and the first phase of the same was to be handed over to the nation by January 2000. But that is yet to happen. Moreover, the whole project seems to be in a limbo. Says Kumar, "The perception that there is a shortage of international bandwidth is misplaced. The real issue is that of providing connectivity within the country."

Be it private players or DoT, a robust Internet backbone has to be in place. For a security conscious nation like India, the local hosting has to be seriously considered, as the same would enable the country to take care of the data in adverse political scenarios or in the event of a war or a disaster. If the high-speed backbone with the Internet exchanges is available in the country, a majority of the e-mail and Web site-related requests would be routed within the country with lesser reliance on the international bandwidth. Comments Dewang Mehta, president, Nasscom, "Our projection of 300Gbps by 2005 can come down by about a 100Gbps if we have a good internal infrastructure."

However, the bigger question is whether the NIB in its current avatar can really be the answer to India’s Internet infrastructure?

The NIB will add a bandwidth of only 34Mbps to the national backbone on the major routes and 8Mbps on other routes. This could lead to a problem of connectivity with the international bandwidth. Comments Kumar, "We have major centers in India as users of bandwidth, such as Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi and Calcutta. And these would need to be connected on the domestic links. VSNL would typically require a STM-2 link (155Mbps) to connect such centers." So even if the current NIB comes into play, it would stand redundant, considering the buoyant demand. Also, the first phase of NIB would connect only the main cities and until the second phase is completed, the rest of the country would not be able to avail of the benefits of NIB.

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