A big debate is on about what really are India’s bandwidth needs today and what it would be like in the years to come. Though there do not seem to be any easy answers, one can look at the global trends and study the demand drivers which are quite linked to polito-economic ambitions of a society.

Today the governments, corporates as well as individuals are keen to quickly benefit from the Digital Opportunity. Internet is a tool to help the masses: in the areas of education, health, employment, trades & commerce etc. Digital literacy pushes up the Internet usage and in turn the bandwidth. All the upcoming multimedia content, in all walks of daily life, is going to further drive demand for bandwidth.

The Internet and e-commerce are in very infant stage in India. Poor Internet speed makes it unpleasant and discourages e-commerce transactions. As Internet speeds improve, bandwidth hungry applications will become increasingly popular due to the enormous savings of time and money as well as convenience they bring. E-governance is fast becoming popular as a tool to deal with inefficiency and corruption, and bring in transparency. A new way of life emerging around Internet is creating impatience for bandwidth with people asking for their "daily bandwidth". Bandwidth is being considered as primary a need as food, clothing and shelter, and bandwidth consumption per capita is emerging as the new indicator of economic progress in this Digital Age.

Let us look at the pushes and pulls leading to the so called "bandwidth explosion" worldwide.

New enabling technologies and delivery platforms are providing the market push for bandwidth. With multiplying silicon/processor speeds, today’s computers are already coming with Gigabytes of memory, with new models at over 50 GB. This allows users to push and retrieve huge data into and from the networks, provided they offer the appropriate speed.

The optical technologies are helping the speed to double every year and cost is going half every 2 years. Now data packets are being transported over DWDM based optical backbones and cross connects. Photononics is gradually replacing electronics in various parts of the telecom networks.

Wireless spectrum is being more efficiently utilised and new frequency bands are being put to use for broadband applications for instance LMDS and MMDS.

Storage technology is growing even faster than silicon and bandwidth due to revolution in magnetic and optical technologies. Large and cheap storage banks are moving on to the Net.

Thus, from days of shortages, we are moving to those of plenty. And so is with the various competing access technologies in the last mile of the network now called "the first mile" viz. DSL on copper, cable TV modems, Broadband wireless (LMDS/MMDS), and quite soon, 3G Wireless. This is creating huge demand for bandwidth, both domestic and international.

The new ‘converged’ networks are end-to-end broadband made possible by fibre optics in the long distance networks, which brings advantages of higher quality-of-service as well as low latency, low electrical interference. The convergence is also coming in terms of fixed-mobile networks delivering ubiquitous services. In such broadband world, content emerges as the king. Moreover, IP based services are helping efficient bandwidth utilisation. 

Source: "Business of Telecommunication" by Niraj K. Gupta (Tata McGraw-Hill)

Telecom is essential infrastructure for growth. Deregulation in telecom is spreading with many players jumping into the fray---sometimes at huge costs for entry or customer acquisition. The aggressive competition drives the market place and the demand. Also the global telecom growth pushes even the underdeveloped regions to catch up.

As the technology improves at fast pace---thanks to Moore’s phenomenon---cost of everything, the processors, storage, and bandwidth is coming down. High capacities drive the prices down and push the consumption up. This leads to creation of new applications, and opens new segments, in turn driving demand.

The growth of Internet---and now fast Internet/multimedia (requireing Megabits/sec of speed, 1 Mbps = 10⁶ bps) as well as mobility feature are resulting in explosion of ‘bandwidth demand’.

Due to emergence of a large number of global telecom players, Trans-Atlantic demand has been growing continuously and is expected to reach over 50 Tbps by 2009. The three main factors driving Trans-Atlantic demand are: deregulation, rapid adoption of the Internet/corporate intranets and broadband access (ADSL, cable modems, fibre to the customer). FLAG was the first to announce a Terabit (2x2.4 Tbps) submarine fibre-optic cable across the Atlantic which is going to be ready soon i.e. in first quarter of 2001.

Asia-Pacific is expected to have 72 million Internet users by end 2000 (33.6 million at end 1998, representing a CAGR of 46%), out of which China may itself reach 20 million. Approximate Internet in most user penetration developed countries is crossing 40% mark: Korea > 40%, Singapore 40%, Taiwan 36%, China (i.e. in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai) 23%, and Hong Kong 29%.

The number of broadband users is also increasing fast with cable and ADSL emerging as the most popular access technologies. Fibre to the customer will increasingly become popular. Trend is towards "always-on" connections and popular applications are: Video-on-Demand, e-Commerce, Gaming Video, Conferencing etc. Mobile Internet is seeing the highest growth in Asia with i-Mode service in Japan having 10 million users

Due to the high growth of Internet in Asia Pacific, bandwidth demand across the Pacific is growing rapidly too with fast-internet/broadband being its biggest drivers. The submarine cable systems ready or coming up across pacific (Japan-US, China-US, PC1, Southern Cross) vary from 80 to 640 Gbps each and FLAG is already planning a terabit cable across Pacific. The new terabit cables will support optical networking. 

It is already predicted that India is going to have atleast 100 million fast Internet subscribers (even if we take modest estimates of 80 million cable subscribers and 20 million PCs by 2008). Many of them doing e-commerce transactions and some even using video streaming applications. A simple calculation based on average usage of 2 Mbps per user will take us into hundreds of Giga bits/sec (1 Gbps = 10⁹ bps) demand, if not terabits/sec (1 Tbps = 10¹² bps). And in addition, if we can make it happen, there are expected to be hundreds or even thousands of large corporates/MNCs in software and other IT related activities, data centres, call centres, server farms—each feeding gigabits into the pipes. It’s all a matter of ambition and determination.

However, to reach those hundreds of gigabits consumption, we have to start consuming first the few gigabits available today. To get the country onto the Internet and broadband bandwagon and to reap the dividends of Digital Opportunity.

Between the "pipe dreams" and "dream-pipes"---the choice is obvious !

Niraj K. Gupta
Communications Today, Nov-Dec 2000 (Annual Issue)
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