Broadband

Last month India & Bangladesh went into an agreement for power and bandwidth. India stated export of an additional 100MW of power to Bangladesh while Bangladesh started a 10Gbps link to Indian state of Tripura. (News article on this here)

Tripura is an Indian state having its boundaries with Bangladesh as you can see in above map. Coming to routing side of things setup is that BSNL (AS9829) is buying IP transit from Bangladesh Submarine Cable Co. Ltd (BSCCL) at $1.2 million / year. This means a cost of around $10/Mbps/month or 662Rs/Mbps/month. It’s hard to say if it’s good or bad since other link from BSNL is via it’s other links. But yes it’s good to see a layer 3 connectivity in terms of IP transit relationship rather then leasing dark fiber or L1 waves as they would have caused bit inefficient routing in the area. In order to do this BSNL has setup a “gateway node” at Agartala. I think it would be pretty much a node with approvals under ILD from doT and extremely likely a LIM device for lawful interception.   Months before it actually came up, Dyn research tweeted about this visible routing relationship.  

Came across this impressive cover of last mile broadband issues in Orcas Island in Washington state in Arstechnica.com.

It’s very true on how so many areas are just not served and likely will never be served because when you have large telecom players bidding for billion dollar worth of Spectrum, all they care next for is very high value returns. And if they do not see those kind of returns, areas stay unserved. India has even poor story where it’s challenging to get wired broadband in most areas of country including key metro cities.

Today I came across a nicely written article in Business Standard on NOFN. Article’s title was “NOFN: A distant dream”. I must say it is one of good articles I have seen so far on the topic and most of other articles appeared to be factually incorrect and more like Press Releases of UPA.  

Some key points from the Business Standard article:

According to a top official at the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the project was conceptualised without a proper study. “NOFN would connect 2.5 lakh villages from the block level. But, no study was done on the details on optic fibre still the Block level, and how healthy those fibres are. Experts say that the NOFN project does not include service offering. It is just about the laying of optic fibres. For end-to-end services, service providers will have to set up their own infrastructure at the gram panchayat level. While the initial cost was projected at Rs 20,000 crore for the NOFN project, private companies will need to pump in much more than this amount to offer services to end customers.

Sify is one of really interesting companies. One time pioneer of Indian internet market via chain of cyber cafes. Good old days. Present situation of Sify in consumer market is not significant. Latest earing figures clearly state company is moving towards enterprise segment.

Company is quite aggressive in enterprise segment offerings specially datacenters & corporate leased lines.
Is consumer market really over for Sify or there’s still some hope?

Well, consumer broadband market isn’t really over! Infact this is the main market which is yet to explode in India!

You might have heard of NKN i.e National Knowledge Network by Govt. of India. Overall idea of NKN was to connect all educational institutions within country including all IIT’s, IIM’s, NIT’s and various govt. universities on fiber at 1Gbps speed. Though little late and crazy way of solving problem, but still NKN is nice effort from Mr Sam Pitroda.

I was talking to a friend from IIT Delhi last week, and here’s his speedtest.net result from his room (yeah room, not any lab!)