BROADBAND: Needed, a Bandwagon!

W hat’s really exciting about broadband? Well, certainly the high speed
that it delivers, and its always-on nature. Broadband refers to any type of
transmission technique that carries high-speed data, voice or video streams over
a common wire.

As far as users in India are concerned, a broadband connection is still a
dream as Internet access speeds offered by the present service providers seldom
exceed 40 kbps. The reasons are largely infrastructural and right equipment
requirements, and at present being shown as financial.

Consider a service provider who rents a 2 Mbps line with the intent of
providing Internet over cable to all of his customers. The customers are
promised blazing speeds, and initially everyone seems to be happy. But the
service provider will not refuse the users that wish to sign on. The increased
user-base will overload the limited bandwidth and pretty soon distraught
customers will start to pour out of the network and service provider.

Current Trends

In terms of the sheer size of India and its population, the number of people
who have cable TV has increased enormously and hence, they are ready for some
kind of broadband connection, provided it is reliable and always-on.

The mindset has always been cable for home and DSL for business. If the
broadband operators actually must change this concept in a much better way than
they have been doing so far, a lot of people might actually opt for data and
voice over broadband versus dialup services.

The hindering blocks have been really that if you take a dialup kind of a
setup, the user has to just buy one modem off the shelf and connect to the PC,
sign up with an ISP and you are online.

In the case of broadband somebody has to come to your house and do some
installation and tuning to get it up and running. The other truck role is for
the PC technician to come to your house and actually set up the IP addresses in
your broadband device so that it can actually talk to the back-end system.

The broadband service provider (BSP) have to realize that they have to
actually reduce this and what is required for this is proper back office
operation system support (OSS) solutions that automate this whole process, so
that users just buy one broadband device and place at their home to become
on-line. The BSP should be in a position to project numbers in the range of a
few thousand or hundred thousand subscribers in a quarter or some target of this
kind.

So basically, the BSP must have a target for themselves, so as to deliver
right price and performance, to stop the churn of the users. If we have voice
and data using the same infrastructure then it can be a huge advantage for the
new generation broadband operators.

Broadband Advantages

Once Broadband access becomes available to home users it will truly change
the way people work, play and live. The higher connection speeds enable
multimedia applications such as real-time internet audio streaming, posting and
displaying digital photographs for friends and family, viewing the video clips
of news events and movie trailers, and taking virtual tours of hotels and resort
areas before making reservations.

People with broadband access tend to leave their personal computers on and
use the Internet for more mundane tasks such as checking television listings and
looking up phone number-tasks that were not worth the bother with the slow
dial-up connection, which first had to be established.

Broadband access shall allow the people to telecommute effectively as though
they are physically present in their office: e-mail, file sharing, simultaneous
voice and data access. The vision of the Broadband home is that broadband
multimedia–video, audio, voice, and data will be delivered to and with in the
home to personal end point devices. The service will be affordable, easy to use
and available to average family and will be delivered quickly, securely and
reliably.

Video on Demand (VoD) or streaming video is going to take off in a big way.
Internet gaming is another domain that could attain new dimensions with a
broadband kind of set up. Content provisioning is also another exciting thing to
watch out for where service providers can stream in target specific content.
Broadband is such a great infrastructure which can bring in a new era of
converged communication (voice, data, video and messages).

Broadband RoI

There are about 50 to 60 million phone customers in India at present and
about 40 to 50 million TV cable users. If one can give the voice data and video
on the same infrastructure, say, for about Rs 500 per month, which includes the
NLD voice and data and maybe another hundred or two for the VoD, and this may
open the flood gates for a new era of customers.

Operators can build the network for about 5 percent of existing customers and
2—3 percent new customers with in three to five years, which shall be about
2.5 million users. The only issue is that the BSP should not make it again a
pipe dream, with lack of equipment, infrastructure and reliability.

In terms of investment, it shall be about $120 per user, which can be taken
back within a 12-month period, if the infrastructure is perfect.

Broadband Market Penetration

It is a fact that the market penetration levels achieved by multi-switching
and broadband IP technologies are unprecedented across the globe, for so young a
medium. Telecom deregulation, an explosion in data traffic, the popularity of
the Internet and application service revenues are forcing Indian service
providers and carriers to re-examine their approach in providing broadband
services.

Users want multimedia communications access and instant information both in
their personal and business lives, and the major source of revenues reside
primarily in revolutionizing the IP infrastructure based broadband service
domain.

IEC’s Take on Broadband

Respondents (see pie-chart) to an IEC survey were asked to rank a list of
"action items" in order of their significance for the residential
broadband industry over the coming two years. The trends that the broadband
industry must address before the end of 2004 are:

• Find a killer application and tie it with a residential business model
  that protects profit margins
• Amass attractive broadband content
• Make home installations quicker and easier
• Migrate current dial-up users to broadband
• Adjust broadband prices to reflect customers’ value of the service

It is apparent that, for all the emphasis placed on finding
applications and content that will drive home broadband, the element of the
industry that most directly touches the user–the provider segment–is as
concerned with how to make money off the service, as it is with how to attract
new customers to it.

KVS Gunneswara Rao,
director (VoIP), D-Link India