It’s the one thing that will change the direction and pace of every aspect of the new economy in 2001. Bandwidth will help define how fast businesses transform, and PC and software growth, and whether our software exports keep up their blistering growth or slow down, and whether India becomes a really significant player in back-end or IT-enabled services…

This year will see some of the infrastructure projects go live—including right-of-way owners deploying bandwidth capacity. Most of India’s bandwidth is satellite-derived or satellite-routed—even when it comes in from sub-oceanic fiber. This is expensive and will change rapidly in 2001. By the end of this year, Dataquest expects that well over half the national bandwidth will be served entirely through fiber and copper, with no satellite hops anywhere. (Next year, when additional private fiber landings go live, this will again jump up—to over three-quarters.)

In 2001, corporates will begin using Internet bandwidth as a strategic business resource (VSNL so far has sold a mere 3,000 64 kbps-equivalent channels of Internet capacity). And convergence is the inevitable twin. All the more so where bandwidth is not abundant and plentiful. When you lay fiber, you have to optimally use it—for voice, data, video. In the way so far have been archaic restrictions on the interconnect of networks, on running voice over IP, and more. These will go. By end-2001, this is what enterprises will be able to do, at least in Delhi and Mumbai and locations where basic services operators are active:

• Applying for 100 phone lines? No more 100 pairs of copper and year-long waits for "hunting" numbers that drop dead. You’ll get fiber or copper E1 lines, with multiple channels. Increasing capacity will be a matter of activating extra channels.

• Setting up a new office? No need to put a separate Cat 5 LAN and a Cat 3 voice network. A common enhanced Cat 5 gigabit-ready network will handle data, as well as voice over IP. What will allow this? A simple legislation, somewhere in mid-2001, finally allowing corporates to connect this converged network to the PSTN as well as to a digital leased line for Internet access.

• Cheaper high bandwidth local connections, including fiber and coax cable, will let corporates set up cheaper WANs and closed-user-group networks. With a limited fat backbone in place between Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, ISPs may charge differential rates for local or national IP traffic on the same lines, versus Internet traffic through the international gateway.

GE’s Jack Welch spoke of power, not bandwidth, as India’s last new-economy frontier. That’s an old-economy veteran speaking, one not "acclimatized" to India Inc. Indians are used to being without power: we generate it where we need it. North India spent over half a day in darkness on January 2 this year, but much of industry carried on, on its own steam—or diesel. Our publications headquarters went without power for over two days, and we didn’t notice. But we can’t generate bandwidth and connectivity locally, so we have five streams of Net connectivity: satellite, fiber, ISDN, copper leased line and dial-up. We can lose our power, but we can’t lose our bandwidth. DQ

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