India To Offer Free Broadband by 2009

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

You can call it "free" if you'd like to, but I doubt that installers will work for free and manufacturers will make equipment for free. So, what you really mean instead of "free" is "paid for through taxation". It's no more free than having police, roads, or congress.

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Thanks milhouse. Do you honestly think that anyone here actually thought that there was no source of funding for the project?
Come up with a term that concisely distinguishes between a pay-to-play broadband service and the act of offering a service at zero

Subsidized

I believe the term you are looking for is "subsidized".

Government is empowered by people who don't know the difference between subsidized and free. Thanks for doing your part!

MOD PARENT UP

exactly the point . . . thanks for putting it so cogently.

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The thing is, if this is a wired connection we're talking about, it will benefit only the relatively wealthy. I.e., the relatively powerful. And if it's a wireless connection, then it's a lot cheaper than roads or electricity. And faster to build. (Con

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Ok, I agree that maybe for India this is not the best thing if most of their population is destitute but in general, I think this kind of idea is great. I live in Canada and let me say I've been praying for government-funded fiber to the home for the last

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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

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They already do monitor it in the EU. As a Bonus the ISPs and telcos have to foot the bill for it too. Ain't that nice of the government? No higher taxes!

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I live in Canada and let me say I've been praying for government-funded fiber to the home for the last few years now.

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 wi

Re:It's not free

Yes, and that's the trouble. Rule #1: There's no such thing as a free lunch.

The government here in India wastes too much money on such frivolous ideas, and on services to political class (free travel, free elecricity, free telephone calls, you name it). In the end their luxury is financed by us, the middle class. Every year the rate of taxation is increased (a tax on "services" has gone up from 8% to 12.36% in the past few years), or an entirely new tax is added.

There's no other solution but to cut down on this stupidity and direct the money towards the poorest of the poor. There will be plenty of scope to reduce taxes afterwards.

Re:It's not free

So, what you really mean instead of "free" is "paid for through taxation".

The big question is "paid how much?" The three biggest expenses for big ISPs are:

1. "Last mile" connectivity
2. Advertising and promotion
3. Billing & accounting

With community- or government-provided networks, #2 and #3 go away completely, and most of #1 goes away too. Here's why.

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!

You have NO IDEA what the costs of running a broadband network are! You left out
-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
...and a bunch of things I'm not allowed to talk

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In what world do you live where tax-sponsored programs don't have billing and accounting? I work in public sector, and I can tell you this is absolutely not the case. In many cases, it's more complex than in private sector.

Really the only thing you avoid i

Re:It's not free

It's no more free than having police, roads, or congress.

You're right, but paying for something doesn't necessarily make you poorer. If it's a good investment, you get back more than you put in. India isn't doing this because they think websurfing is more important than clean water, they're doing it because computers are a big and growing part of their economy. This is a bold, competitive investment.

Broadband -ne Food

Uhh, maybe it's me and my misplaced sense of priorities, but you might want to help the starving people dying people in the street before you give them free prOn.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Re:Broadband -ne Food

There's an old proverb that relates to this. Something to the effect of "If you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. If you give a man free porn, he'll die with a smile on his face."

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Just like the States should spend it's budget on education and health care before invading another country. Can you spell hypocritical?

Re:Broadband -ne Food

Can you spell hypocritical?

Um, H-Y-P ... dang ... can I hear it used in a sentence please?

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Um, H-Y-P ... dang ... can I hear it used in a sentence please?

Is a hippo critical to having a proper large mammal house at a zoo?

Re:Broadband -ne Food

...you might want to help the starving people dying people in the street before you give them free prOn

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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Free internet is a good thing, but if the people in poverty don't have electricity, than how are they supposed to use the internet?

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Just having a wander through the streets of Delhi makes you realise how daft this idea of offering every citizen broadband is.

I was having a conversation recently with a well educated, wealthy, middle class Indian lady. She was telling me how high the aver

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Well, electricity can provide heat both for cooking and for not freezing. Though the people living in two-room huts (one room of which is for the livestock) probably aren't going to benefit from either the electricity or the broadband.

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It's not quite as simple as that. India is getting a higher and higher GDP from the tech industry. If they pump money into that then the state will get more money to put into feeding its poor. If they spend the money on feeding their poor and none on devel

I didn't know you could have milli-bits per second

So you get 2 mbps. I guess that means 1 bit every 500 seconds. 1 billion people in India, 2 million bits per second. That's not that tough, but I guess giving everyone somewhere to plug in would take some infrastructure.

More Outsourcing?

The article raises a few issues. The first of which is what level of connectivity are we talking about? Does "access" mean a line to every home, or just access to a line by every household. The former would be a boon to all citizens (especially those living in tenement slums). The latter isn't as impressive as one could establish this by having access to one computer in each village.

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.

Better infrastructure = more wealth

Free broadband will, of course, result in India becoming a richer country. I am happy about that.

India's Priority Listing:

1. FREE BROADBAND!!!!!
2. Feed our citizens
3. Nuke Pakistan
4. Restructure caste system
5. $1 taco Tuesday
6. AIDS prevention? ....

I'd love some speed first please

If they go through with this, it'll be really cool. Maybe, before that, just one small change would make me really happy. I have a 'broadband' conncetion right now, and the speed is a blazing 256 kbps. That's because that's what our Department of Telecommunications has defined [dot.gov.in] the minimum speed to be, for an ISP to call its service as a broadband connection. Disappointing, somewhat.
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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What area in what city? Seriously. I live in Canada, and every city has broadband. At least 1 MBit if not 6 0r 8. Tiny little rural towns are another thing altogether, but I don't think there's a town with more than 10,000 people that doesn't have real

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I'm in Bangalore of all places. Check out this page [airtelbroadband.in] from my ISP, they mention a max speed of 512 kbps.
(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 pr

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Get a BSNL connection - you'll get 2 Mbps at the same rate as Airtel.

Service level will be poor

For any company that sets up offices in India, bypassing the public telecom system is job 1. When you see a picture of big-wig executives showing off their snazzy India facility, see if you can spot the satellite uplink on the roof. Believe me, it's there.

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

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

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If they were really pro-consumer, they wouldn't have any tariffs to begin with. All this statement does is congratulate them for reducing a situation they caused in the first place. Hardly "proactive".

What, as opposed to the US who is allegedly pro "free t

Increasing Competition?

How exactly does one increase competition by reducing the number of players? Please forgive me, but I am enormously skeptical of the ultimate purposes of this plan. At the highest level, this sounds very good. Many in India have benefited greatly as the

Part 2 of Plan

Once the free broadband is in place, it can be used by impoverished people to go online and experience virtual food, virtual education, and virtual opportunity. It will be called, "Do-over Life".

"for all residents"?

60% of households in India do not have electricity yet according to Reuters. I assume they are going to have to wait for a massive electrification program before that is possible.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N07237764 .htm [alertnet.org]

Already Here

In Houston [technewsworld.com].

Jefferson warned us....

"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it.

Right...

All this talk about India being so hot and ready to break onto the world stage. This kind of talk has been going on for well over a decade, and nothing's happened.

India has it's fat head firmly up it's hubristic arse. There is no way anything like this

tech support

Luckily for them they already have the call centers in place, I wonder if they have a hard time understanding them as well.

Indian Subcontinent

Pakistan is on the Indian Subcontinent. I am very surprised that India would offer free internet access to Pakistan.

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.

Indian Middle Class Population of America.

I see many postings about India should feed its starving masses first. First of all India has not had a famine since the 1964 Bihar famine.

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.

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Technology arrives to the masses in a curve, the first being early adopters,
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 th

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They got their priorities right.They think farther ahead.
The free internets are not for starving people.

Re:You know what this means?

The amount of Indian porn is going to increase exponentially.

How can a country that has infrastructure and famine problems in some areas (a recent study suggested 47% of Indian children suffered from malnutrition) manage to provide this?

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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Having said that, it seems that this is a case of a relatively small minority of religious fundamentalists getting their panties in a bunch over nothing. Most Indians didn't seem to have a problem with it. Of course he should have been more sensitive, bu

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Dude.... You've got to understand that in different places around the planet, there are different cultural norms & whether you agree with them or not doesn't make it right, wrong or absurd.

At one time it was a cultural norm to enslave, whip, rape, and

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Yes they went nuts on it, no questions asked but take a gander at the video footage of the 'kiss' was more gere forcing himself on the chic with her trying to back out... couple that with the largely existant scarred psyche from the colonial era it doesn't