India's Internet bandwidth growth significant: Report

Telegeography's Report "Packet Geography 2002" says India's international Internet bandwidth growth has been significant, increasing more than four-fold since last year from 354.6 Mbps to 1510.5 Mbps 

Internet infrastructure in Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent is wrapped up in a transition from U.S.outpost to regional Internet axis.Fifteen Gbps of intra-Asian subma- rine cable capacity at year-end 2000 will have spiked almost one hundred-fold to 1,215 Gbps at year-end 2001.Announced deployments should boost that number during the following year. The new capacity –and the corresponding drop in prices –will help stimulate backbone deployments throughout Asia .This trend is already emerging in India, where the bandwidth drought has been such a major issue that has occupied front-page real estate in major newspapers. Like its neighbors to the east,the subcontinent ’s transformation is very much in progress.VSNL ’s aggressive provisioning between 2000 and 2001 has suddenly placed a large quantity of international capacity in the hands of service providers. Furthermore, DishnetDSL ’s partnership with TyCom Global Network should result in South East Asia Cable Network (SEACN), scheduled to go online in mid-2002 with 640 Gbps of fiber lit. Rival Bharti ’s alliance with ingapore Telecom is to yield the i2i Cable Network in March 2002, which, when announced, had the largest upgradeable capacity of any repeatered submarine cable in the world.As Internet capacity continues to shift onto the new systems, more of India ’s international Internet bandwidth will link to Asian destinations.

New to the Scene

Integrated closely with the North African countries, the recent surge in international connecivity at Asia ’s western edge owes much to a single submarine cable provider. When it first ntered service in 1997, the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe,or FLAG, became the first privately funded submarine cable system to connect Europe and Asia.A 2000 move to aggressively market managed Internet transit services, however, has turned the capacity provider into a major regional Internet backbone. FLAG ’s Internet backbone strategy has had significant repercussions in the Middle East, a region whose regulatory environments are strict enough and whose bandwidth supply is short enough that the provisioning of a single STM-1 (155 Mbps) Internet connection can be quite disruptive.