Technology - Where Is The Broadband?

(This article is sponsored by The Boston Group)

IMAGINE A very long strand of glass, thinner than a human hair and imagine also a diminutive beam of light travelling through this thin glass fibre for hundreds of kilometres, without fading. This beam of light can carry millions of telephone conversations, hundreds of movies and still have some space left for video games that people play against one another and with machines. Call it what you like, but optical fibre technology borders on magic. This buried treasure can be left alone to market forces or used to serve the poor, the illiterate and the disadvantaged.

Technologists have learnt to manufacture flawless glass fibres of high purity, develop powerful laser light beams, and to combine light beams of different colours without interference. All these have multiplied the information carrying capacity of optical fibre by many thousands and also extended its reach manifold.

What followed these innovations was almost reminiscent of the California Gold Rush of 1849. Hundreds of telecom companies, some old and many just formed, rushed to lay fibres at a feverish pace linking cities, countries and continents seeking fortune in the bandwidth they felt was there for the taking. Caught in the frenzy of fibre build-up, and excited by market opportunities, some real, and more imagined, investments poured in for the telecommunications industry. Within a span of a few years between 1997 and 2001, this industry spent over $200 billion building networks all over the world. Imitating the United States, other countries also followed this exuberance by laying fibres without even assessing whether there was any market for the bandwidth or for its contents.

In India, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) was laying fibres well before the telecom bubble and a rush towards privatisation. After the mid-1990s, more than a dozen companies entered this business and the public had to cope with some more potholes and obstructions on the roads, left unattended by the fibre layers. Within a few years, the telecom bubble burst in the U.S. and Europe. Many dozens of companies went bankrupt including WorldCom and Global Crossing. WorldCom had the dubious distinction of being the biggest bankruptcy in history. About $2 trillion, or five times the Indian GNP, was lost from the tech market capitalisation. There was simply not enough demand for data for the fibres to be lit, and too many players were desperate to provide services. In India before the telecom bubble, there were about 100,000 route km of fibre, and within a few years, the fibre length ballooned to over 300,000 route km. As with the rest of the world, the demand for bandwidth has not materialised as envisioned, except for voice communications. Even though there were no bankruptcies in the country, it is common knowledge that many companies took a hit and some have abandoned the network business altogether. Thousands of kilometres of buried optical fibre cables remain unlit, and a few are used as one would use copper wires for mere telephony.

While the U.S. and Europe can afford to keep the fibres dormant waiting for new business opportunities, can we afford this luxury? Having unlit fibres that could have otherwise provided innovative options for human and economic development is equivalent to hoarding, and a crass use of monopoly power in the telecommunications marketplace. Providing bandwidth at affordable cost would have pushed India to the top of the broadband consumer table and opened new opportunities for landline operators that are now losing their share of the voice telephony market to mobile operators. Instead, South Korea has become the leader in broadband connectivity with 70 per cent of households connected to this option.

There are many areas where broadband can be an enabling engine, some for human development and many others for economic growth. The fibres, because of their impressive bandwidth and infiltration into the country can be used to overcome a major deprivation of a large number of people, namely education. For many, education is either too costly, unavailable, or too difficult to pursue. Using Information Technology and bandwidth, it is possible to structure and transmit various educational programmes of quality for anyone wanting to learn. The contents can be suitably tailored to meet the demands of the student and be available to him or her at the time and place of his or her choosing. We can offer this IT-enabled quality education for all levels, say for secondary school children or to diploma students learning automobile engineering. Unlike other distant education routes, this option can provide a feedback to the student as if she were in a classroom. By making students pay for the programmes they register, and not for the bandwidth they consume, it is possible to provide a wide range of quality education throughout the country. We have outstanding educational institutions in the country that have excellent educational programmes to offer. Much more content and material can be developed. Fundamentally, bandwidth can be converted into a public good, an enabler for human development. Within a decade, India can become a nation of literate people.

Foreign participants to conferences in India always complain about the poor bandwidth available in the country and often marvel at our resourcefulness in capitalising the meagre bandwidth into economic opportunities. This interlude of working with low bandwidth may not last long. Many countries such as China, Philippines and Ghana are working to emulate India and would soon become competitive. Some areas of software have also become commoditised reducing India's market leadership. Indian software companies will have to move up the value-chain to work in cutting-edge technologies that are commercially attractive, but these demand the availability of large bandwidth. For instance, educating a robot to perform a critical manoeuvre in manufacturing from a remote location mandates high bandwidth; searching for and identifying an image from the thousands stored in libraries around the world — as the search engine Google does for words and phrases — would need megabits of connectivity if not in gigabits. One can cite numerous such enticing options, including accurate long-term weather forecasting, that need widespread broadband deployment. Because of the lack of broadband, our software engineers do not enter into such promising and commercially profitable fields. We are not even a minor player in the computer virus detection and computer security business. One goes abroad to work in such areas. We have also not entered into various promising opportunities in the services sector where demands for high-speed connectivity are high. Because of this, India's contribution to the global software industry is a modest 3 per cent. The equivalent figure for the U.K. is around 12 per cent, contributing to a market value of over $ 40 billion.

What prevents us from embarking on such innovative and nation-building missions? It is our presumption that simply providing the fibres should be a profitable proposition. Lacking ideas to use the bandwidth and wanting quick returns for the investments they have made in laying fibres, the telecommunications industry has allowed the fibres to lay dormant without being lit. This is equivalent to expecting people to pay for using the streets and roads. We therefore suggest that the state should lease fibres from telecom companies and make the bandwidth freely available for educational institutions and students, and to software entrepreneurs at affordable costs. At first sight, this may appear as one more state subsidy and should therefore be discouraged. But investments in education or providing impetus to entrepreneurs cannot be branded as subsidies and should be considered as legitimate expenditures of the state. Today, rich content is limited because most people cannot access such material. Data connectivity, when available, costs far too much as a proportion of earnings. Even in absolute terms, consumer broadband costs in Japan are one hundred times lower.

We can also liberalise the sanctioning of loans for buying computers through banking and lending institutions. There are projects now under way to build a single appliance that combines the computer with a television, video conferencing for tele-medicine and tele-education and accessing other experts, IP enabled telephone, and hard disc video recorder. A 5-in-1, if you like, at an affordable cost. With increasing volumes and learning curve, if such equipment could be available to consumers under, say, Rs.10,000, we may be able to penetrate the entire Indian market that places a high value on entertainment (witness the very deep penetration of cable TV). Enticed as entertainment, opportunities for education, healthcare and access to expert advice would also enter the Indian household. While this appliance matures, even simple computers can provide the needed diffusion and spur the development of relevant content.

It is said that the machines produced during the Industrial Revolution eliminated the poverty and hopelessness of rural England. We should aspire to engage the products and knowledge unleashed by the IT revolution to remove the glaring deprivations that debilitate our country and open new opportunities for Indian innovators to flourish in the national and global marketplace. Education and training are too important to be left alone to conventional approaches and deserve out-of-the-box thinking and innovative solutions.