Indian Target-9 mn broadband connections by 2007
Current status-around 1.7 mn broadband users till date.

The figure shows the dismal performance by the service providers on the broadband front. Although India today boasts of PC penetration in big way, but Internet penetration is one such area where the country lags behind many other small countries. Where did we go wrong in increasing the reach of broadband?

India has a broadband penetration rate of 3%, one of the lowest, while Korea and Hong Kong rank the highest with 67% and 57%, respectively. It is evident that India miserably failed to achieve much in the second year of its launch. We have the fastest growing telecom market in the world where mobile phone market grew like a forest fire. Ishwar Jha, CTO, Zee networks, says “Broadband failed to gain popularity in India due to non-availability of content and services that could compliment it and boost its growth.”

The Roadblocks
Global content is the one available from all across the world, says Deepak Maheshwari, GM, Corporate Affairs. “Broadband will be driven by content and localized content will be more relevant as then the latency will be less and the user experience will be better.”

There is a need for the content to evolve in a way that helps in developing new, locally relevant applications in local languages, and hosted locally.

Localized content is important as it broadens the target users of broadband, who are not necessarily urban and English speaking. This would also help the rural populace in implementing and adopting the policies of e-learning and e-governance.

But before getting localized content on to the broadband, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed.

The biggest challenge that looms large is the non-availability of local content, mostly because of the piracy issue. “The perception here is that once the content is on the Internet there is no guarantee how it will be used and the content provider looses out on revenue,” says Jha.

Although several initiatives have been taken in the area of music but applications still remain vulnerable as there is very less clarity on the digital rights management issue.

Absence of an appropriate revenue sharing model is also a significant roadblock in development of localized content. The need of the hour is to have an open channel between the content provider and the operator. SLAs and QoS guidelines need to be made for the service provider and the revenue sharing model needs to be optimised.

Content Delivery Network
Content delivery network tries to keep the content close to the edge towards the consumer. Moreover, there are technologies such as caching, which enable aggregation of content and delivering in a unicast mode with multicasting happening at the edge, thereby reducing the delivery costs.

The roadblock that the players face today is to establish a CDN (content delivery network) due to huge cost of infrastructure, and content protection measures when the content goes to the server for which very few companies have suggested serious initiatives.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has raised the issue of quality of service. “This order by the government leaves an ISP totally helpless as they cannot provide services on a managed network, and quality cannot be assured,” says Maheshwari.

Steps are also being taken to increase localized content. Delhi-based research firm, Indicus Analytics developed a Hindi language search engine called Raftaar. Local newspapers have gone online; webduniya.com offers content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.

Digitization
“The challenge is primarily to get the content from the broadcast domain to the telecom domain”, says Amit Dev, director operations and CTO, Time Broadband.

This is where digitization of content plays a very significant role. The content providers have to convert their content not only for the Internet, but for other formats also. The challenge here is to find the right application and then be able to use it at all times.

“Availability of vendors,” says Jha, “who can provide end-to-end implementation of digitization process is also very rare. Moreover, in India, there is a lot of content for which the ownership is not defined so no one knows who has the right to digitize the content.”

Moreover, making business ready to digitize the content means going through the entire process of digitizing, aggregation, DRM and delivery platform. All this requires huge investment but the consumer domain is so small, making such huge investment is not justifiable.

Maheshwari says, ”There are a lot of standards available for the audio visual content, but on the other side for the textual content, the challenges lies in the standardization of fonts and internationalized domain names.”

Despite all the roadblocks the future of broadband in India is bright. A number of steps are being taken to regularize the content. A lot of upstream and downstream DRM initiatives have been taken. There have been a lot of initiatives in terms of creating standardized framework for content production.

Big telcos like MTNL and BSNL have developed the last mile infrastructure to deliver video content to consumer homes. Sify had identified the potential of local content earlier and has formed a strong base through its SifyMax content portal.

Another major trend that will contribute significantly in popularizing broadband would be the user generated content, where the consumer becomes a “prosumer”-a producer and consumer of content. This is known as the symmetric broadband. Recent initiatives like orkut.com and youtube.com have witnessed a huge success

Broadband has seen an early success in countries like the US and Europe. It has demonstrated that it has the capability to drive the economic growth. The example of Korea is a proof.

This success story can be rewritten in India provided the end user gets flexi plans along with lower tariffs. Also, if appropriate steps are taken to generate quality content and services, which are beneficial for the consumers.

Broadband is a boon for India, but there is a huge digital divide. 60% of India's population is in the villages and today telecom operators are reaching everywhere, so are their networks. Broadband can play a pivotal role in the growth and development of the country. All that is needed is a focused local-level effort from all the players.

Sonia Sharma
sonias@cybermedia.co.in