India To Offer Free Broadband by 2009 245
codecracker007 writes "The Government of India is planning to introduce free 2 mbps broadband for all residents of the Indian subcontinent by 2009. The expected service shall be launched by the government owned telecom operators BSNL and MTNL. Quoting from the article: 'The government proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL. While consumers would cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it.' The India Times has an extensive editorial on the decision. It must be mentioned that the Indian government and its autonomous regulatory bodies are very proactive in holding the consumer interests above the operators', managing to reduce the long distance and wireless tariffs by a up to factor of 20 in less than 7 years."
It's not free (Score:5, Insightful)
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Come up with a term that concisely distinguishes between a pay-to-play broadband service and the act of offering a service at zero cost to its citizenry. Hey how about "free"?
Next time someone offers you a free beer why don't you refuse because you want paid professionals making your beverage products rather than volunteers. They're probably dumpster diving for hops and scrap metal to
Subsidized (Score:4, Insightful)
Government is empowered by people who don't know the difference between subsidized and free. Thanks for doing your part!
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
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To a poor person who pays no taxes, government-subsidized broadband would in fact be "free". To someone who pays taxes, it would not be.
For the record, I agree that it should not be characterized as "free broadband", but as "subsidized broadband". I wasn't contradicting your statement that there is a difference between "subsidized" and "free" - just pointing out to phaggood that they are not mutuall
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It's a rhetorical question - you have to charge for it because otherwise it will get abused. You could have it free for the first 1GB
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This may well be a reasonable use of resources. If you have a foot-powered generato
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And you do realize that "government-funded", you're still paying for it. You just don't know how much.
If I were you, I wouldn't be comfortable with either.
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You wouldn't be at all concerned about your government controlling yours and everybody's Internet access? Just wait till some legislative do-gooder slaps restrictions and monitoring on it, in the interest of national security, the Children, etc. of course. I doubt you'd be so enthusiastic about that.
And you do realize that "government-funded", you're still paying for it. You just don't know how much.
If I were you, I wouldn't be comfortable with either.
Ours is going to do this anyways. Might as well do it while cutting out the requirement to make as much profit as possible off your users.
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Because layers upon layers government bureaucratic bloat has proven _much_ better than corporate profits.
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What makes you think that the government won't squeeze you for revenue in the same way that Comcast does?
Pork doesn't grow on trees, ya'know; given half a chance they'll screw you just as badly, and you don't have the option of just telling them to piss off like you do with a regular company.
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You want this guy to be providing your Fiber?
"A member of Canada's ruling Conservative party [slashdot.org] has pledged to "clean up" the Internet with new bill that would mandate ISP licensing, know-your-subscriber rules, and allow the government to order ISPs to block content."
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not free (Score:5, Insightful)
The big question is "paid how much?" The three biggest expenses for big ISPs are:
Most of the expense of getting residents Internet connectivity comes from connecting up the last few miles to individuals' homes. ISPs could in principal do away with a wired "last mile" with the right wireless technology, but that would make it easy for people to share their connections and passwords with neighbours. Instead, ISPs are charging you a premium so they can keep you from sharing your Internet connection when they insist on using cable or DSL.
We're at the point now where the inefficiency inherent in having to advertise, charge for and segregate Internet service is greater than the inefficiency inherent in public sector projects, which means that financially it's better now to have government- and community-provided Internet connectivity.
Rubbish! (Score:3, Interesting)
-My $1.4 million salary [newnetworks.com]
-$2 - $7 million/yr in campaign contributions [opensecrets.org]
-Dozens of attorneys to sue Vonage out of existence
Mateo LeFou, CEO, Verizon/AT&T
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You forgot #4:
4. Continually upgrading the network to remain competitive.
That cost goes away as well since nothing can compete with a highly subsidized government line. So no need to upgrade.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Really the only thing you avoid is collection costs.
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I'm not 100% sure that this is the case. Even the backbone in the US is beginning to feel the strain from streaming video, P2P and other high-bandwidth activities.
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s/internet/water|electricity|gas|roads/
The internet is becoming a very important service in advanced societies.
Re:It's not free (Score:4, Insightful)
Broadband -ne Food (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, I could be wrong.
Re:Broadband -ne Food (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Broadband -ne Food (Score:4, Funny)
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Is a hippo critical to having a proper large mammal house at a zoo?
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Re:Broadband -ne Food (Score:5, Insightful)
How about the idea that by putting in a more modern infrastructure, more high-paying modern jobs will be created, and all boats will rise? By your logic, it was a bad idea for the TVA to provide rural electrification, because people in poverty don't need electricity, they need food.
I don't know that free broadband will have the effect the Indian government thinks it will. It may not even get built by 2009. But if the government wants to stimulate economic growth, it isn't an unreasonable component of a larger plan to make it easier to do business in India.
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You could charge your battery with a generator or solar cell or at a friend's house that has electricity.
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I was having a conversation recently with a well educated, wealthy, middle class Indian lady. She was telling me how high the average Indian wage was now. I was staggered at the figure she quoted, which, upon some questioning didn't include anyone not 'middle class'. Or, in other words, most of the country.
Something tells me this is the type of person who decided it would be offered
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Point taken. I should have used a better analogy.
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Trust any article on India to have a stupid, bone-headed comment like this. No government in the world spends ALL its money on something like sanitation or solving poverty, before looking into something progressive.
You think there aren't programs to try and solve poverty in India? Think again. Of course poverty is a big problem in India. But that doesn't preclude India from trying to provide a good communication infrastructure to its citizens.
This translates to mo
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(*) Technical innovation in a developing country
( ) Product shipped to a developing market
( ) General discussion about IT in the developing world
The location is:
( ) Africa
(*) India
( ) Bangladesh
( ) China
( ) Somewhere else in Asia
( ) South America
( ) Central America
( ) Other ______________
You're objecting to it on the basis that:
(*) Poverty hasn't been eliminated in that country yet
( ) American jobs will be lost
Your argument is bogus because:
(*) Poverty hasn't been elimin
I didn't know you could have milli-bits per second (Score:5, Funny)
More Outsourcing? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the greater issue, however, is the potential boon this might be to companies looking to outsource operations. One of the driving forces behind outsourcing is the penetration of cheap telecom into emerging markets. Here, you'd have a situation where companies wouldn't even need to pay for internet access to hire workers. They could just have them telecommute from home. If that's the case the amount of outsourcing could increase rapidly. It's a smart decision by the Indian government, as their investment would pay off ten fold if that were case. For the American engineer, though, this is perhaps not such a good development.
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How so, outsourcing is the product cheap internet connections and VOIP. This makes communicating with corporate in the US easy and cheap (not to mention also making foreign call centers possible). If internet connections were to get cheaper, how would that not make the cost of outsourcing cheaper? While I agree your with
Better infrastructure = more wealth (Score:3, Insightful)
India's Priority Listing: (Score:5, Funny)
2. Feed our citizens
3. Nuke Pakistan
4. Restructure caste system
5. $1 taco Tuesday
6. AIDS prevention?
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So in other words, although it's a problem, it's not a huge one.
I'd love some speed first please (Score:3, Interesting)
Btw 256 kbps is also the maximum they're offering in my area in my city, I can't even upgrade if I want to.
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(Their service and support is pretty cool and I'm happy with them on the whole, so I'll forgive them their flash-filled website that doesn't even open properly in Opera)
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Service level will be poor (Score:3, Interesting)
My former employer built an office in India. The prices we were quoted for internet bandwidth were roughly 8X what we paid in the US. In the end, we settled for a quarter of T1 speed for about double the US price. In exchange for all of this, the throughput sucked. Packet latency and loss were simply miserable. The parent article's quote about "...regulators are very proactive in holding the consumer interests above the operators" is total BS as far as I'm concerned.
Power is free in India, which leads to overconsumption and underinvestment in the power grid. Politically, free power is untouchable, yet there is no money available to make it reliable. Anyone who truly needs power learns to generate their own on-site. The same holds true for bandwidth -- bring your own.
pro consumer = no tariffs (Score:2, Insightful)
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What, as opposed to the US who is allegedly pro "free trade" and the like, but then slaps on protectionist import tarrifs, continues to subsidize their domestic industries, and refuses to abide by their treaty obligations?
India is hardly the only country guilty of this. Every damned country does things which
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Hmmm ... 15 years ago, I'd probably agree.
But, age has taught me that I'm no economist, and there are many historical (and occasionally valid) reasons for such market distortions to exist. I
Increasing Competition? (Score:2, Informative)
Part 2 of Plan (Score:2)
"for all residents"? (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N0723776
Already Here (Score:2)
Jefferson warned us.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it.
Right... (Score:2)
India has it's fat head firmly up it's hubristic arse. There is no way anything like this can be pulled off - check back in 2009 and see what they actually end up with...more hot air and nothing to show for it. Just like less than 20% of their MBA holders being employable. India is a waste of time - steer clear and save yourself the headaches.
tech support (Score:2)
A Bad Idea (Score:2)
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Well, free as in cost, not liberty (Score:2)
Indian Subcontinent (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh.
I am not very surprised that the story submitter made a statement that is not in the story, and the Slashdot "editors" did not edit it out.
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1 billion people... massive area...poor people (Score:2)
Of course a government can succeed where private enterprise failed. There will of course be no problem getting 2Mbps to 1 billion people, oh no, and of course the fact that most don't have a computer and that the level of literacy outside of the major cities isn't great won't be any sort of barrier.
Nice political statement, but I'd say there is m
Indian Middle Class Population of America. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the poor are numerous they are seen everywhere. Heart wrenching scenes of squalor abounds everywhere overwhelming the other part of Indian population. Half of India is on susbsitence level and two-thirds of India does not have any disposable income to speak of. That still leaves some 330 million people with disposable income, who form the middle class. That is bigger than total population of USA 300 million.
So let us not go overboard and think all Indians are dirt poor living in slums.
free...to the home? (Score:2)
Just another form of media (Score:2)
It is so utterly weird that I was thinking of exactly the same thing this morning - of all things, free broadband access in India, although the wireless kind. Here's my take on it:
Internet is elementally another form of media, just like TV or radio or newspapers. In India, there are state sponsored TV and radio channels - have been around for much longer than cable TV arrived on the scene. In fact, government run TV (Doordarshan) and radio (Akashvani) in India were the primary information channels servin
The actual story (Score:2, Informative)
There is no such plan.
India's Minister of Communications & Information Technology recently launched the Re.1 OneIndia scheme where all telephone calls originating and ending in India (local and long distance, mobile and landline) will cost only Re 1. (2 Cents) During the press conference he was asked if a similar scheme is possible for net connectivity and he said the vision is to:
1. Start web hosting with MTNL and BSNL (The govt owned telecom companies) so
Bad Idea Go with Wifi (Score:2)
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the middle being somewhat savvy people, and inevitably the the laggards.
By the time every laggard has access to the technology it will be an expected
commodity. A good example of this is the telephone.
If the broadband is "too hard to use", it wouldn't have ever taken off and made it past the early adopters.
Making technology a commodity is more important than trying to push out an education program.
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The free internets are not for starving people.
A Billion People can Multitask (Score:2)
What if it thinks it's an important thing and wants to work on more than one problem at a time?
Or what if it thinks it'll be a major economic stimulus, bolstering the economy, raising many citizens' quality of life, and thereby increasing tax revenue to the point where it's feasible for it to attack its major poverty issues?
Re:You know what this means? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, first off, America has decent connectivity. Not the best, but decent. I have something 4 Mbps to my current house, and 8 Mbps is an inexpensive upgrade. Some regions have fiber to the home at substantially greater rates.
Yet, when I walk around downtown Denver, I am constantly walking past homeless people who are asking me for spare change so that they can eat/buy booze that night to consume while sleeping on a sidewalk. Whenever some new technology intiative is announced here in the US, I never see hoardes of posters complaining about American priorities. I never see people in large numbers saying how we need to make sure that absolutely everybody in the country has food and shelter before we allow anybody to do anything else. Yet, whenever India has some technology initiative, it seems like a very substantial percentage of the comments are nothing but comments about how India needs to feed the hungry.
So, no country has no hungry people. No country has no homeless people. It's impossible to "solve" the problem 100% before doing anything else.
Second, how the fuck do you think India will be able to feed their hungry? They just magically decide it's a good idea, and everybody gets fed, and then everybody gets on with their lives all happy and dandy? No. They need to create an infrastructure where more people are more educated, and can do better jobs in order to grow their economy so that all those hungry people can get jobs and feed themselves. Internet access for everybody is potentially a huge step forward in this aspect. you know the old "teach a man to fish" wisdom, of course. Well, give a man efficient internet access and he can post fishing tutorials on You-Tube and teach everybody to fish. Not into fishing? Fine. Give a man high speed internet access and he can easily set up an online store to sell his rugs or hats or novelty oversized fingernails overseas. Anything you can sell overseas means money coming into the economy, the tax base growing off of foreign money, and more leftover money for homeless shelters.
See how this works?
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Of course, here in the US we also have small but extremely vocal groups of religious fundamentalists that make similarly ridiculous statements -- but generally, we try our best to ignore them, and the courts certa
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At one time it was a cultural norm to enslave, whip, rape, and occasionally hang black people in the South.
Whether I agree with that or not, I guess it's not right, wrong, or absurd?
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It was accepted by the majority of members of the culture, therefore it was culturally accepted, therefore it has something to do with culture and your head is someplace warm and dark. And stinky.
It is wrong to tell people that they can't do things that aren't hurting you, because you would like to have the same freedom and anything else is hypocritical.
Unless, of course, you're a sheep that does what you are told, in which case the most benefit you could p
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When it comes to laws against polygamy in the US, I am in complete agreeme
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I don't presume to know the man's mind, but Gere would likely have offered that apology whether it was sincere or not so that he can hopefully go back to India to continue his charity work without being arrested.
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