India

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.

NIXI i.e National Internet Exchange of India is well known for it’s inefficiency and for its bad policies. I am posting this blog post to discuss some of them.  

Bit of background:

NIXI is one (and only) Indian IXP i.e Internet Exchange Point established in 2003 so as to facilitate peering between Indian ISPs. Before this, there were lot of cases when Indian ISP’s were connecting to each other from outside India in Singapore and Europe. Thus NIXI established few exchanges in key cities where necessary infrastructure was provided to ISP’s to “peer”.  With peering, the strict technical meaning is that exchange of traffic between ISPs.    

In last few days, I have been pushing discussion on APNIC & NANOG mailing lists about poor DNS infrastructure in India.

Thought to put a quick blog post on the issue.

So what’s exactly wrong?

To understand what’s wrong, let’s understand how DNS works at core level. DNS relies on a hierarchy model with . (dot) on top which is Root and TLD i.e Top Level Domains below Root, which further  follow 2nd level domains which are popularly domain names we use. So e.g mail.google.com is actually like

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!)

Today I read in news about Govt’s decision to finally end inter-circle roaming agreements between Airtel, Vodafone & IDEA. Well, the case is not new. It has been up with doT from over months and got highlights when CEO’s of all 3 firms wrote letter to Prime Minister of India for his intervention.  

Little background

In 3G auction held in 2010, none of the operators got pan India spectrum across 22 telecom circles. Most of them have license in around 10 circles (few in 9, few in 11 and so on) and thus no one can provide full Nationwide 3G coverage.