DSL Prime: Every Village in Andra Pradesh

In India, they're planning to deliver DSL at a price that many will be able to afford. If they can wire every poor village in India, it's pretty obvious the telcos in Maine or Indiana can do the same thing.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV [January 7, 2005]

Télécoms sans Frontières, our industry's response to crisis. FT has donated satellite links to TSF, and Vodaphone 100,000 pounds.

Télécoms sans Frontières, (Telecoms without Borders) is in Sri Lanka, a team having flown straight to Colombo. In Hambontota in the Southeast, where the GSM network is not working reliably, they've set up satellite lines at the coordination center and at the hospital.

A reliable network can be lifesaving. Early in the morning one day, my brother Danny (once a paramedic) got a call on his cellphones from a very tired relative. The way she talked worried him enough to call a 911 ambulance. At hospital, her red cell count was dangerously low, soon diagnosed as gastric bleeding. They took her off arthritis painkillers, and three days later her red count came up enough to avoid surgery. She's back at work now, doing fine. But if her phone didn't work that night, she would have drifted off to sleep and a coma. You protect her when you do QA on your network.

Away from the seashore, AP announced a remarkable program to run fiber to every village, and offer DSL for just a few dollars per month, all built in two years. With modest state backing, a consortium including megacorp Tata/VSNL will provide better connectivity than most developed nations. Shame on telcos in Indiana, Florida and Maine that aren't doing as much.

SBC and 2Wire had the hit of CES, a 250 gig home gateway with fabulous potential. Next DSL Prime will look at the related policy issues, keeping the net open and affordable.

Jennie and I are headed to Tampa for Paradyne's event with the IOCs, where I expected to be impressed by how rapidly video over DSL is spreading in the U.S. That means I'll miss a great event in New York, the Needham Conference. Anton Wahlman and Vik Grover closely follow innovative mid-sized firms. If you want to hear what's coming, listen to companies at the show like SeaChange, Conexant, Sonus, Zhone, Sigma Designs, Terayon, Harmonic, Polycom, BigBand, Tut, Netgear, Adtran, Arris, Centillium, C-COR, Concurrent, Atheros, Metalink, Vyyo.

Fiber to every village in Andhra Pradesh
74 million people to connect, $2.30 month for two Mbps
India's 240 million rural children will grow into 168 million more people looking for local work over the next two decades. The stability of their country, and the world, depends on integrating a billion rural poor into a more prosperous society. The broadband Internet doesn't change everything, including lack of schools, but it's a major step important to support.

Aksh Broadband Limited will run 80,000 kilometers of fiber, connecting the state capital with each of the 23 districts with 10 Gbps bandwidth, 1 Gbps with each of the 1,127 regional headquarters and 100 Mbps to each village through fiber optic network, reports The Times of India. 40,000 government facilities will be connected with a monthly fee of $2.30, many of them local "Rajiv Internet Village" community access points. Press accounts suggest that the individuals will also be able to connect at 2 megabits for $2.30, but I haven't been able to confirm that officially.

Learning from the mistakes of the west, Andhra Pradesh in South India is getting broadband to a higher percentage than many U.S. states and at a fraction of the cost of UK and Canadian "incentive" and "demand pooling" programs. They want connectivity, budgeted for it, and it will be delivered. The state defined what needed to be connected very broadly, set a limited subsidy ($50 million), and solicited bids. Predictably, carriers at early meetings said it was impossible to deliver widely at the price set, with the Indian phone company, BSNL, among the whiners. The government, well advised, held firm, and was able to choose from eight bidders. Aksh is a fiber manufacturer near New Delhi, who led a consortium including Railtel (the communications subsidiary of the national railroad) and Tata/VSNL, a division of a world class multinational.

Dr. Y.S. Reddy, AP chief minister, surprised the world by beating Bill Gates' friend N Chandrababu Naidu in May's election. Naidu was a great technology proselytizer, who lost the election because of the anger of the rural poor. This project, scheduled to be completed by the end of 2006, will make Andhra Pradesh an even more important tech magnet, while delivering the Internet to the villages.

The $2.30 price for 2 megabits seems unsustainable to me, even if a customer buys her own modem and pays an install fee high enough to cover the capital cost of the DSLAM. I expect an ISP or similar fee will need to be added. But the project benefits from enormous economies from serving every town and minimal marketing costs. DSL equipment price drops have been so extreme it's probably cheaper to hook everyone up efficiently, rather than one by one as they order. That's BT's 21st Century Network - voice and data on every line, saving money by installing everyone.

If they can wire every poor village in India, it's pretty obvious the telcos in Maine or Indiana can do the same thing.

Copyright 2005 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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