BANDWIDTH: The Spoilsport

Software

industry asks for tax sops. The operators ask for removal of

licence fee. Users want global standard products and services at

affordable price. No one talks of bandwidth.

As someone said,

everybody’s problem is nobody’s problem.

Unfortunately,

the $50 billion IT dream, the dotcom revolution, bulks of VC

money have no meaning, if we do not have this basic resource. It

is difficult to survive–let alone be a superpower–in IT

without this vital resource.

Voice & Data thought

the issue deserves more attention than it gets today. It took a

small step.

It

invited the best brains in the industry who are directly

involved. The idea: To discuss the issue thoroughly and at least

find the direction in which to take the next step. The panel

consisted of representatives from all categories of stakeholders

in India’s bandwidth game. The network equipment industry was

represented by Anil Batra, president (India and SAARC

region), Cisco Systems. The service provider segment had its

man in Harpreet Duggal, vice president (sales, marketing, and

operations), British Telecom (Worldwide), the only global

operator for whom India is strategic. For the network integrator

industry perspective, there was Shashi Ullal, president and

managing director, Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd. The

user side perspective was provided by P Swaroop, general

manager (IT), Hewlett-Packard India, whose parent company is

one of the heaviest users of bandwidth globally. The satellite

equipment side was represented by Manoj Chugh, country

manager, Scientific-Atlanta. Last but not the least, there

was the real bandwidth man: Niraj K Gupta, director

(South Asia), FLAG Telecom.

The discussion was moderated by

PK Roy–our chief editor–for whom this is an issue that he

has been dealing with for quite some time–as a writer, as a

technology reviewer, as a user, and as a champion of the Net

revolution in India.

PK Roy:

Bandwidth is one issue we have been grappling with. I personally

believe that bandwidth and connectivity are the essence of a lot

of things, which we do not think about. When you are planning

applications or enterprise system, bandwidth is the key. If you

consider India’s entire bandwidth, it is roughly equal to one

very fast connection to the Internet by a Singapore company.

This brings up a wide variety of issues–bandwidth for the

enterprise, bandwidth policy issues and Government’s role, the

impact of bandwidth on the economy, and the business potential

that bandwidth holds. What’s the issue? Is it the scarcity of

bandwidth or its planning?

Harpreet Duggal: My

personal view is that there is a scarcity from the domestic

perspective even in our landlines or whatever is laid off and

obviously the capacity that is available from the international

perspective, whether it’s coming from fibre or from

satellites. We find in case of more and more of our customers,

there is always a scarcity. Their planning cycles do not fit in

with the actual availability. I will just make note of

SEA-ME-WE3, which was contracted by VSNL a year back. It is

still not critically available. That gives you an idea of the

lack of capacity. My personal opinion is that at the end of the

day, there is a scarcity. There could be planning issues that go

with it, but definitely there is a scarcity.

PK Roy: Is

it primarily an international gateway kind of issue because you

have a lot of people actually wanting to use this connectivity

to access Internet or external connectivity? Or is it as big a

problem on the domestic backbone as well?

Niraj K Gupta:

I am pretty confused, that is to say the least. The scenario is

yet to clarify for some of us who may be new to the issue. But

you know, now corporates have already put in gigabits, Internet,

LAN… So whatever it means, in the future to come you know in

what direction the global corporates are heading for. Now there

is a big mismatch in the middle. India has only 150 Mb flowing

out of the country. I was talking to my friend-colleague in Hong

Kong today. They are having on FLAG system itself five gigabits

activated. There are 11 cables connected to Hong Kong. So I do

not know really what really our intentions are in India. We are

talking about being an IT superpower. Lots of people are looking

at India as their IT base. But there is a big mismatch not only

in terms of domestic infrastructure but also in intention where

are we heading as a country. As one of the major bandwidth

providers around the world, I have no clear signals. I have 600

million dollars ready to invest in any part of the world. We do

not know what we can do for India.

PK Roy: Shashi,

where do you see the real problem lying?

Shashi Ullal: Like

in every other sphere in this country, here also we have

shortage. Though in recent years things have improved, in some

of the critical infrastructural areas, there are tremendous

shortages. I think we have great deficits here. It only goes to

prove that our planning has been completely lopsided. A

telephone was considered to be a luxury to be used only by a

rich people till recently. Somebody forgot that it was important

for running a business too. So what emerged was long queues,

long lines of people clamouring for the plain old telephone

system and you were lucky to get one.

This mindset of having

priorities totally mixed up has been the root cause of the

tremendous shortage of bandwidth today. There has been a mention

of shortage world-wide but in India particularly the shortage is

very serious. The IT managers in corporates are weary of

planning for any major applications on WAN for the simple reason

that there is no bandwidth available from any source and if it

is available, its reliability is a big question mark. Now these

days, when mantra is to go in for mission-critical applications,

end-to-end enterprise control system management, one does not

know where the bandwidth is going to come from. Take the VSAT

industry for instance. There the situation is even worse. In

1993, when a newspaper article said that in the space segment

there was tremendous amount of bandwidth available but there

were no takers. Again, the planning was done by the bureaucrats

in terms of what kind of bandwidth is to be provided for in the

next satellite and in what frequency–C-band or Ku band.

The result is that after

the failure of the INSAT 2A in October 97, the industry is

totally starved of bandwidth. The users are really in trouble to

the extent that if you add one more VSAT in the network of a

customer you have a risk of the network going down. So

personally I think that a quick action has to be taken. And of

course, the government is talking about setting up of a national

backbone comprising optical fibre of 10 GB that would be ready

probably by the end of the year.

PK Roy: Manoj,

would you like to comment on it? It looks frightening when you

see India’s total bandwidth is of the order of 150-160 MB in

terms of external connectivity to the outside world, whereas one

company in Singapore connects at 155 Mbps. From the perspective

that you are supplying the equipment to the user.

Manoj Chugh:

I think it is a very valid point. One of the fundamental things

which everyone is really missing out–by everyone I mean people

who matter, few people who decide on policy–why this sudden

talk of bandwidth? Did we ever hear of a term called bandwidth?

We have heard of roads. I think collectively we have failed to

either teach or coerce people into understanding the importance

of bandwidth. First of all everyone must recognize that

bandwidth is a wealth creator. We are talking about India’s

software exports going from $4 billion to $50 billion. If you

talk to people in NASSCOM, they would say that is certain. You

go and talk to leading software companies, they too are sure.

How is this going to happen? Then we turn around and everyone

says that the biggest killer application in the next ten years

for India is IT-enabled services. But how is IT-enabled services

ever going to be enabled? I think it is very important for all

of us to really understand that to enable anything at all to

happen, to make sure that the dotcoms survive, the big companies

in the IT survive and the poor man in the village can hopefully

communicate with his mother in another village, bandwidth is

key.

What have been the key

drivers for this sudden rush for bandwitdh? We heard of gold

rush many years ago in California. This rush for bandwidth is

something similar. Again perhaps going back to the West. If we

see, fortunately or unfortunately, 80 percent of the web servers

that we access today are in the West. And 20 per cent of those

servers are catering to the 80 of the traffic. So it is a

classic 80-20 rule. So basically all of us are rushing to few

guys. Obviously it is a major choke–a major choke going out, a

major choke coming in. Unfortunately, here again the arithmetic

works against us because the ratio at which we are pulling out

information from these 20 per cent servers is in the ratio of

10:1. That means that we are pulling out 10 times more

information from only 20 percent of the servers that are out

there and all of us are doing it across the globe. Now, who gets

better performance? I think, the writing is on the wall.

Obviously, the guys who have bandwidth, guys in Singapore and

Hongkong who have better bandwidth than we have and they are

trying to gain over us.

Today we are taking about

creating an IT superpower out of India. How? It really beats me.

It is very important to understand that today the bandwidth is

not simply to make a businessman feel happy that he is able to

communicate with five disparate locations, but the fact is

bandwidth is a wealth creator. And the moment we all understand

this we have to make sure that one way or the other we make it

available. If you look at every organization, there are two

applications we are talking about–ERP and CRM. Do not ask me

CRM, ask the software guys. They will tell what they are doing

in CRM and how they are conquering the world. But they certainly

cannot conquer their own organizations within India by

connecting seven or ten locations and implementing a CRM

application. So if ERP and CRM are critical to coporates to

survive in a competitive environment then obviously the

networking gurus are working to change the paradigm of computing

from host server to client server and to now Internet based

computing . Applications certainly demand better networking. The

way Internet applications are written and they are written in a

fashion where you actually take ten times more bandwidth than

you actually make a request for. It is absolutely asymmetric and

that is where there is a place for satellites. Unfortunately we

do not have too many terrestrial guys otherwise we could have

taken them on. The bottom line is that we need bandwidth. The

applications demand that we have bandwidth. I think may be we

are not able to make our voice heard. I think this is a good

forum for us to go and tell everyone that if you want India to

become an IT superpower, if you want a $50 billion software

export, give an organization to connect a few places to Internet

a decent performance. At least give us a few hundred kilobites

if not megabites so that we can make our business survive. I

think the situation is really grave.

Shashi Ullal: When

we talk of broad-band issue, the situation is even worse. And

more and more business applications are migrating towards

broadband.

PK Roy:

Swaroop, your perspective now. You are a heavy user of connected

applications world-wide. What is your perspective?

P Swaroop: Today

in India, there is a shortage of bandwidth domestically and

sometimes internationally for need of fibre connectivity. We

have chosen a fibre connectivity for speed and response times

because we all are looking for productivity. And the faster we

do something better it is for us. For example, we are looking

for a high-speed link between Mumbai and Delhi. I was told that

2 MB was not easy to get. We had to really use lot of pressure

to convince the government to give us 2 MB. In that sense we are

finding a shortage and looking at our future, a lot of projects

that are likely to come up will be looking at very high

bandwidth utilization.

PK Roy: What

is your current utilization of bandwidth?

P Swaroop: We

are on 512 Kbps on international links to US. I am talking about

HP India sales organization but we also have the software

operations which uses 1One MB to the US and 768 Kbps to other

parts of the world. So in terms of the sales organization we

have about 512 Kbps. We have two hubs–both in Delhi and

Bangalore. As we have ten offices in India connected together

and they require connectivity at the same speed if not lesser,

we are now looking at high-speed links bewteen Mumbai and Delhi

which I am told is very difficult to get. There is no bandwidth

available today. Same thing is true when one asks for fibre

connectivity out of India. We are usually told that the VSNL

link between Delhi and Mumbai is also constrained. I know that

for out of India, VSNL can give us high-speed connectivity but

there is a shortage. I would not know about that one. It has

given us what we have wanted on that front. Right now, we want

somebody to give us 4 GBs. We need government authorities to

give us faster response times. Our plans are not matching with

their problems. We want to do something in the next one month

but we can not do because we do not have infrastructure.

Harpreet Duggal: I

am definitely in the networking game and I understand this. But

whose fault is it really? We have identified there is a

shortage, whether it is domestic or international. There are two

elements involved here. Let us for a moment forget the fibre and

just look at the satellites. Even INTELSAT has not planned for

India. Why? Do not blame it on VSNL straightaway. Today, if you

go to INTELSAT, they cannot give India a single transponder.

VSNL cannot change that for us come what may. Even TASS is not

ready to give capacity to India. So we will be uncharitable here

by blaming VSNL. We need to look into our own backyard.

Niraj K Gupta:

I think why these investors do not come here is because they do

not find it lucrative enough.

Harpreet Duggal: That

is not true. Today India is lucrative enough and any satellite

capacity would be taken up. I can tell you that if INTELSAT can

give us six transponders, it will be signed up in two weeks–legally

delivered and ready to be paid in two months’ time. You tell

me that you have KU-band capacity on TASS, it will get signed up

in six weeks. So we have to look into our own backyard. When BT

did its planning, as any international provider, we said in

India we would be lucky if we sell two transponders. I think we

have to be little careful here.

Niraj K Gupta: I

was not talking in that perspective. I was saying that anybody

who is investing is looking at what is happening in general to

foreign investment.

Manoj Chugh: I

think you are right. The matter-of-fact reality is that non of

us has actually motivate anyone to do something good for India.

We have only been able to convince the world that we have talent

and skills and above all we are cost leaders. Because of that we

are able to attract investment but we have never been able to

attract investment by selling India as a supermarket for

applications or computers and so on. Afterall, it is just now

that people have started talking about the fact that a Sun, an

IBM or a HP sells it is high-end computers in India. Till some

years ago it was not true at all. A lot of applications and

software development are driving that. The key thing here is

that no one actually anticipated that India would be able to

generate a heavy requirement of bandwidth. Also important is

that everyone in this group understands that the desire in this

group may be to go and ask for bandwidth, but look at the past.

How many years it has taken anyone to get anything off the

ground? You look at telecom, you look at power, you look at any

sector. Unfortunately our track record has nothing much to write

home about. Of course, we are much better than what we were 50

years ago but we are still not there where our investors want us

to be. There is a great market here we can convince the

investors but the government binds us.

PK Roy: To

close the first part of the discussion. I will put this to Anil.

Clearly there is a bandwidth shortage. But if you leave aside

the very connected MNCs type of users that Swaroop represents,

how much is the demand-supply gap? Are there a lot of users

today who are implementing bandwidth hungry applications

especially at the SME level?

Anil Batra: Bandwidth

can be looked at from two points. One is the service providers

side, the other is from the enterprise side. What you are trying

to talk about is more from the enterprise side. Now how much

bandwidth will one need depends on certain factors. To give you

an example, we are a very Net-oriented company and we use lot in

terms of bandwidth. We have 2.4 GBs fibre coming right into our

campus and 2.4 GBs sitting there at the campus. How is it that

we came about that we would need 2.4 GBs all the time? It is the

CIO, he is the user who has a team of IT people in every

business unit

About three year in

advance, we are looking at what applications are going to get

rolled out, when is the videoconferencing going to get rolled

out in our various offices, when are we going to have unified

messaging and so on. That is the direction being taken. So for

example, when will we have voicemail coming as e-mail and a

e-mail come as voicemail or video mail. How are these going to

be rolled out? So the onus of the design of network and the use

of bandwidth actually lies with the CIO of the organization.

Before I answer the question as to whether we really have enough

bandwidth or we need more bandwidth, what we have to look at is

how many people are right now ready to go and implement newer

applications? This will be the process where the bandwidth will

be required by any organization. I am seeing this from Cisco’s

point of view and I guess no other company is very different

from what we are. As far as bandwidth in India is concerned, we

are mainly looking at an enterprise trying to get a circuit out.

Obviously, there is a lot of satellite provisioning that is

possible through VSATs and you can have multiple of those E-1

equivalents that can help you. My knowledge says that E1 is what

you can get on a satellite. Our next step is to have E3s or have

ATMs but those are things which will happen as we deregulate

more and more and build more infrastructure. Once you see fibre

in the ground that will be the way to really get bandwidth into

enterprises.

PK Roy: If

you take this now from the perspective of the government now

that is seeing lot of revenue possible from software exports.

Sometime back we had function organized by V&D where I

brought the example of India’s total bandwidth being a little

less than a single company in Singapore and the DOT’s

secretary’s response was scathing. He made a statement that

this was not correct as we actually have 2 Gbs and India does

not have a shortage and will never have one. Now obviously,

there is a disconnect here.

Niraj K Gupta: Even

in the government, there is a big disconnect somewhere. For

example, I got a call from the IT secretary of Karnataka the

other day. He was asking me that whether I can tell him as to

when can I give them fibre pipe in Bangalore. I am being chased

by the AP people. The CM himself asked me as to when are we

reaching to their high-tech parks. Investors are not coming

there–they ask where is the bandwidth? There is a clear

message from people like Exodus–we will not come till the

bandwidth is there. OK, they are states but here the Centre has

all the time in the world to decide on policy.

PK Roy:

This is one visible revenue area. Now, for instance, someone

here mentioned dotcoms that will be very heavy users of

bandwidth–probably the heaviest on the pyramid. Today the

approach is that you can actually locate your web site anywhere

because that is the way the Internet is and you can operate

business out of India. Is this

an angle that may be taken up to tell

the government that if you actually

have a lot of sites hosted here,

there could be other implications including revenue, business

and may be more start-ups.

Manoj Chugh: I

think we need to reach at the fact that IT-enabled services

cannot take off, software development cannot go up to $50

billion despite what everyone says, if we do not have

infrastruture. We need to tell that we will be able to generate

higher value-added jobs in the country.

Harpreet Duggal: Who

is going to provide that capacity?

Shashi Ullal: I

suppose DoT. DoT, you all know was a monopoly untill recently.

De facto it still is. There are just two private operators who

have got some kind of network in few areas. In most circles,

they are dormant. Cellular networks do have capacity but that is

not being used apart from for voicemail because of regulations.

Niraj K Gupta: Essentially,

I think in the foreseeable future we will have to depend on DoT.

Shashi Ullal: And

they have everything going for them except an understanding of

quality, standards, reliability and speed. The problem is that

most DoT people, even at the senior level, only understand

voice. Very few people understand the use of this technology for

other things than voice. Everybody knows that in future the

current trend of 30 per cent data and 70 per cent voice is going

to reverse but DOT has not realised this. You need to plan for

future. You do not suddenly get bandwidth out of nowhere. And in

our country, the planning cycle is much longer.

PK Roy:

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? The government has

set up a task force and the task force has certain

recommendations which are aimed at increasing bandwidth. Among

them are things like giving people right of way, enabling people

to carry bandwidth. There are some international projects like

its participation in Project Oxygen. Oxygen is supposed to take

off in 2000-2001 time frame with a very dynamically allocable

capacity. The task force recommendations are a very feasible set

of steps because we have seen several of those 108

recommendations happening. We actually did a checklist and found

that some 25-30 of those 108 had happened in some or the other

way. And the rest have not takeen concrete shape yet. But it is

a step. Some body has actually identified this and put the Prime

Minister’s name to it and said that we need to do these if we

are to achieve $50 billion target of software exports. At least,

you do not have the daunting task of telling that to the

government.

Niraj K Gupta:

I think the task force today is trying to come out with long

term solutions which will take quite sometime to implement. Is

there a way to influence the task force, say, collectively,

because individually the members are quite responsive? As an

entity they probably get blocked by what the DoT says. We need

to have a rational discussion with them.

Manoj Chugh:

I think task forces are of little use. They come and go.

Actually we have failed to sell this story to the government in

a positive way. The biggest problem plagueing the government

today is fiscal deficit.

We have to somehow

convince the government that we can help the economy do better

and generate wealth. This automatically will widen tax base. We

are all playing a role in creating infrastructure. Bandwidth is

a key enabler in that. If we want to create wealth, if we want software exports to grow–if somehow we can generate some

arithmetic and get some nice economics and try and prove to the

government that there is a mathematical formula–if the bandwidth goes up from 150 MB to 2 GB your tax collection goes

up from X thousand crores to Y thousand crores. 

Shashi Ullal: Some

economist has come up with this fact that for every one percent

of investment in telecommunication infrastructure, there is 3

percent increase in GDP.

PK Roy: Where

do you think is the gap between what the software industry has

been able to do (by showing government that providing incentives

will translate into $50 billion by 2008) versus what telecom

service providers and equipment vendors have not been able to do

to translate what bandwidth actually means because both are

intangibles–software export is equally intangible as he

bandwidth is.

Anil Batra: I

will say in two different ways. One is that the software

industry was not checked, not controlled, it grew on its own.

People then thought what can be done to make it grow better.

Okay, leave it alone. That group which is looking at software

export expansion to $50 billion or $80 billion as the Mckinsey

report says, with IT-enabled services is not necessarily being

looked at by various other groups like DoT or bandwidth

providers in the same vain.

They are looking at them

as two separate compartments with their own different business

models and not realizing that the two actually go hand in hand.

We are working in, what is at Cisco referred to as Internet

years–a normal year of life turns to equivalent of seven years

when we say one Internet year. That’s the pace at which things

are moving right now. The task force did a good job and brought

some issues on the table. But it’s been a year and things have

changed dramatically in that one year. There has to be a process

of continuous review and improvement, continuous plan, a

"do, check, and act" kind of thing so that one can

improve upon what one has done in the past and what one have not

done. That’s one issue.

The second is that India

has the opportunity to build the world’s largest Internet

Export Zone, as I call it. There are software, and hardware

export zones. But look at the Internet Export Zone as the key

enabler for our economy because the whole world is using

Internet to grow their businesses or grow their GDP. Countries

are trying to tie their plans to the Internet to grow so all the

data centres and all the other things, that we talked about can

form part of the Internet promotion zones and those zones can be

freed of shackles of bandwidth and then you can allow anybody

and everybody to get whatever they want–they want a sonnet

dropping into that zone, they want 45 Mbps or multiples of E3

running across. That’s the opportunity we are sitting on. We

have the technology, we have the programmers, we have the

ability to put data centres together–this is what can be done.

PK Roy: What

do you think Harpreet? Can your industry convince the government

that instead of 155 MB, if you have multiple 10 GB drops there

would be some change?

Harpreet Duggal: There

are two different ways of looking at the issue. Let us segregate

the two. Presently look at in-country–here DoT is the only

model that exists today. Though there are plans of the railways

and private players coming in, but realistically today we know

that DoT is the only way. But sitting in this forum, I would

like to understand that do we have a proposition to make. We

recognise that they are slow and have their self interest and

nothing that we discuss here is going to change that. As

suppliers and as partners, partners in crime, if one can say, do

we have a proposal? That is one thing.

The other is that we have

forgotten that there is nothing outside this country either. I

spend probably more time convincing to get a link then selling

it to customer. Now what do I have on the table–do FLAGs and

BTs of the world as suppliers with capacity have a proposition?

There is no capacity coming in. Then, there are in-country

issues that we all are talking about. We will have to find ways.

We all know realistically that we can change the DoT in the next

two to four months. If we cannot change them what is the model?

You can take a holistic view and tell them that if you are going

to do this, DoT will have phenomenal turnover or that will

happen. But that is not going to happen.

PK Roy:

What about presenting an attractive picture?

Harpreet Duggal: The

picture is there. Look at the cast. In one year VSNL would have

lost $100 to 200 million on not getting SEA-ME 3 live. That

itself would have been big incentive. I am sure that the CAG has

something to say about it. But truth is that has not change

anything. Capacity has been paid for, while cables have been

lying in Cochin and Mumbai

PK Roy:

Why cannot you have an equivalent of NASSCOM lobbying in the

language they understand?

Harpreet Duggal: It’s

happening informally, I think. It’s happening with people like

BT and value-added service providers are saying that their

business is not doing well.

Niraj K Gupta:

Not informal. Our issue has been taken up at various levels.

Chandrababu Naidu has taken up the issue. The ministry of IT has

taken up the issue officially in the new task force.

Associations like CII have presented our case before the task

force. Even senior officials in the government tell me to keep

talking about it.

Shashi Ullal: I

have been involved in discussions with the government on this

industry. But the focus on bandwidth per se has not been

there. Take the NTP ’99. I do not think there was bandwidth

mentioned at all. It has different watertight compartments like

convergence, licensing issues, basic telephony and cellular

except bandwidth. Hence this idea of focusing on bandwidth and

co-relating with how much more exports it can get us. If this

exercise is done, I think, we can get something more.

PK Roy: May

be we can take this up and involve some other body like NASSCOM

in a discussion to co-relate either to the fact that if one dose

not do this, the $50 billion will be $10 billion or present an

equivalent picture which they understand.

Manoj Chugh: Somewhere

I get a feeling that the guys who are driving the software

business believe, like a lot of people in India do, that the big

guys will never have a shortage. Even if there are shortages,

there are guys who can get on. For these guys shortages for the

rest of world did not matter at all. May be in the software

industry also (I hope I am wrong) there is such a syndrome. I

think we have not been able to bring about the seriousness of

this whole thing. That’s one thing which is very critical.

Another thing is that a lot of services like webcasting and

multicasting require much more bandwidth are not seeing the

light of the day.

You need bandwidth to

drive these applications.

PK Roy:

This brings us to the second part of the discussion where we

look at the enterprise. What kind of issues are we going to

encounter. What stops you from getting that bandwidth that your

enterprise needs?

Shashi Ullal: First

of all, the provider of bandwidth is the DoT. And they

themselves do not know whether it’s coming or going. Number

two, there is a genuine shortage of capacity. Where do they get

it from? We kept asking them. As per the new telecom policy, it

says that foreign satellites will be allowed for communication.

But they also say that they first saturate the indigenous

satellite capacity only then will DoT allow them to go for

foreign satellites. What’s has happened is that when the

government of a country comes out with a policy, the bureaucrats

and DoTs think that they have the right to change that policy.

Then there is mad race among corporates to come up with

enterprise-wide networking and applications. There is a scramble

for bandwidth.

Fourth is the license

condition itself–the title of the licence says 64 Kbps. When

the world is whizzing past in MB and GB we are still condemned

with 64 Kbps. Then of course comes this question of band. They

created what is known as extended C band because they said they

do not want the terrestrial network to be interfered with. Now,

there are six transponders with extended C-band and they will

let us use only two. Why not the other four. They say they are

not coordinated with the terrestrial network.

Waste in the plenty is

okay, but waste when there is scarcity? That’s not permitted.

So either way we do not get what we want and customers who have

put plenty of money setting up hardware and applications find

that they finally ca not get through.

PK Roy: Swaroop,

could you give us a user’s perspective on this? What are your

preferred means of getting bandwidth, both for your network and

access to Internet?

P Swaroop: We

look at fibre in terms of response time. We were using satellite

earlier. Ours is not a software kind of operation. We have our

data centres located in Singapore. The problem is that fibre in

India is only out of Mumbai. Our Mumbai staff now has to come to

New Delhi and go back to Mumbai on DoT lines then go to

Singapore. I do not know why they do not have a link in Chennai.

Lot of HP organizations are looking for investment in India

because we have good people here. But when they see that it

takes six months to get something done here, they go elsewhere.

They want to set up call centres but find there is no bandwidth.

Harpreet Duggal: Reality

is that bandwidth is driving business rather than business

driving bandwidth. When I go to customers, they redo the whole

design depending on whether there is 1 MB available or 512 MB.

Here I will give you an example. The latest twist in the ISP

gateway licence is that any carrier with more than 8 Mbps

downlink would not be allowed because the DoT found that the

C-DOT equipment that they have for security can only monitor up

to 8 Mbps. Basically, it says that no capacity in a single link

can check more than 8 Mbps. So what happens is that the business

model changes. If someone who was looking at multiple downlinks

of 36 Mbps is now suddenly looking at three downlinks. The

capacity that he wanted is not there, forcing him to change the

business model.

PK Roy:

Anil, you have a CIO or CTO planning applications for the

future. In India, how aware are the customers and the senior

management about possible future application and

the options as to whether they should go for fibre, dial-up ISDN or VSATs?

Anil Batra: One

of the things we need to step up is the use of IT in India. Use

of IT in India is probably the lowest. Other countries are

already looking at it and trying to see how they can do that. If

you go back you will notice how the US economy has grown because

of investment in technology. Therefore, the fact is that when

you invest in technology or IT you see a tremendous growth.

Seeing all this happen many companies are looking at IT but have

to act quickly and find out where and how we can compete for FDI

when countries around us are providing better infrastructure.

Shashi Ullal: There

was a global survey by the Conference Board of New York and it

found that in the US there is a real increase in GDP related to

investment in manufacturing technology. To give an idea, if the

US is hundred, India is seven in terms of production. I think we

are better than Bangladesh but worse than Pakistan. There is a

co-relation no doubt. And bandwidth obviously is important. You

can have lot of hardware coming in but if there is no bandwidth,

it is of no use.

Harpreet Duggal: I

think that is a holistic picture. If you come back at the

enterprise side, the reality of the situation is that any

enterprise manager comes to India because it costs less and he

would not add any extra cost by pre-buying capacity. I have not

come across any sales cycle or an enterprise manager in India

unlike the CIO in Cisco saying that his applications, three

years down the line, would need to go from capacity A to

capacity B.

PK Roy:

Even if there is no pre-buying, do you find enterprises planning

that way?

Harpreet Duggal: Planning

might be there but pre-buying gets in capacity. Buying a sonnet

connection for applications two years down the line, the IT

manager would not do it here–even if the capacity is

available. They would not add capacity because they came in here

because of cost and their management would not agree to any

extra cost. Second, there is always a fear about the cost of

capacity. I do not think suppliers and providers are doing

anything to negate that fear. As we see around the world the

capacity costs have been coming down. Are we providing that

buffer to the IT manager? We are not. Therefore there is a need

for a commercial model.

Niraj K Gupta: Harpreet

said that FDI is coming here because of cost of skills. The

other thing is that many of the investors are not coming in

because of the cost of bandwidth here is ridiculously high. On

the second issue about advance buying of capacity, I will give

you the example of FLAG Atlantic. When we announced the project

last year–1.2 TB capacity we went with a pre-sale campaign and

in three months we sold half of the capacity. Then we decided to

double the capacity to 2.4 TB. We collected the money and

started building the cable. As of date even the new 2.4 TB is

half sold though the cable is still to be ready. The whole thing

will depend on what kind of commercial deal you offer–if you

offer people attractive deals, then they are even ready to

commit on long term basis because their requirement will only

grow and never come down. We want to do it here in India also

provided the government comes out with clear signals.

Anil Batra: Today,

everybody realizes that Internet is important for survival. It

is not a cost but a competitive advantage, a toll for survival.

That has come as a realization and the second thing is that

there are ways and technologies available, which can increase

bandwidth very rapidly. For example, if you have fibre in the

ground you can use DWDM equipment on the same fibre strand.

Usually when you have a pipe you have 12, 24 or 48 fibre strand.

Take one fibre strand. If it is giving you 2.4 GB today, what

one can do is one can connect DWDM equipment on either end. Now

one can have 120 channels and different pipes each running on 10

GB. So effectively what one has done is that on one strand of

fibre one has been able to now make provision for 1.2 TB.

Imagine we have 1,000 kilometre of fibres in India! If we had a

mechanism of quickly getting this equipment up and running we

would be able to provide fibre to anybody who wants very easily.

Now the issue is

implementation. The onus, of course, lies collectively on all of

us, implementers, users, suppliers, etc. I personally believe

that technology is available today. If IP applications are going

to be the way applications are going to run–IP over glass is

the future. There will be no ATM on the way and no sonnet, just

IP over the fibre.

PK Roy: Manoj,

how do you find the enterprises when they are planning

applications today? Do you think a parameter like being

web-enabled is becoming a necessity in applications like CRM and

ERP? Is that the fundamental driver or is that still not a basic

requirement somebody would put up for enterprise-wide

application?

Manoj Chugh:

There is no CIO in India who does not talk of web-enabled

applications. The question of cost is driving everyone to

web-enabled applications. What you need to run these

applications is thicker pipes. In the near future CRM and ERP

will be web-enabled. These will drive the demand for bandwidth

more and more. I recently asked a customer about how he had

architectured his solutions. He said that he had chosen

distributed application because the cost of bandwidth is very high. I said why did he want to

buy VSAT because in distributed applications one just needs to

make sure that data moves in pre-determined time intervals from

location A to B. Considering that the availability of

transponders and the costs involved he would better call

Bluedart because they would be the best people. IT-enabled

applications mean more bandwidth.

If you are not able to drive those applications, customers and

users are going to be unhappy.

PK Roy:

Given that you have limited bandwidth, how do you find users

actually managing it? Do users put in user-level policies or

those based on time and congestion? 

P Swaroop: We

use monitoring tools to monitor the utilization of bandwidth end

to end. We also take the needs of the users, while we develop

our bandwidth plans. But as mentioned above, our plans do not

match the providers plans. We monitor the application response

times and have metrics to trigger bandwidth increase. We have

plans to implement policy-based bandwidth management.

Anil Batra:

That brings us to another issue. You know the Quality of Service

(QoS) at Layer 3 is what helps you make efficient use of

bandwidth. It means that if it is a SAP, somebody should be able

to recognize that. If you go to a certain URL, a certain one

which is important for your business, you have to be able to

recognize users trying to reach those URLs and be able to become

content sensitive while you do not have to waste time.

QoS is the other issue.

So, therefore, whatever bandwidth we have if one wants to

conserve it within an enterprise, one has to look at features

like QoS—how one can implement those and to make efficient use

of whatever one has. Even if you have gigabits within your

office, downloading, uploading and looking at URLs can block it

up pretty soon.

PK Roy:

How do you find users in this area? Is there a science of

networking? I mean, is there a method that they follow in

planning the bandwidth? And if they do, do smaller systems integrators follow that?

Anil Batra:

I think enterprises need to work on that. But the fact is that

bandwidth grows faster than you budget for it.

Shashi Ullal: Our

experience is little different. First of all when our company

wanted to implement ERP, we brought a consultant. And my

experience is that eight out of ten consultants do not know how

to estimate bandwidth. So they said you need a big pipe connecting everyone in your office. That was very expensive.

Whereas what we have done is we have people who specialize in

fine-tuning ERP network. Surprisingly, it comes to around 1 or 2

Kbps per VSAT out of 35 so 35 x 2 means 70 Kbps. I am not

talking about MB yet whereas a consultant would have said 64

Kbps per each user. Whether one uses it or not it is like a pipe

in the sky. We were able to do this using conventional

technology. So consultants themselves do not know how to

estimate bandwidth.

PK Roy: Yes,

that is an issue.

Niraj K Gupta: But,

certainly the scarcity is for real.

Harpreet Duggal: Yes,

as I said in the beginning, there are planning issues. But it is

not a case of "either" or "or". The scarcity

is definitely the most daunting issue.

PK Roy:

To sum up, though we have to go a long way in managing

bandwidth, there is a basic minimum that should be available.

Presently, we are way behind that mark. We have to convince

everyone that all this IT revolution is really dependent on this

crucial resource. And it is a priority.

With that, I would like to thank all the

panelists for making the discussion really interesting and