| Broadband-IndianScenario
The Indian broadband market is ready to hit the big time.
Contributing to the growth impetus is the new technology brought
in by Sify in way of Hybrid technology which includes an Ethernet
network and wireless network for the last mile. We at Primus
Infocom have joined hands with Sify to provide broadband services
in and around Pune.
Currently in a nascent stage, the broadband infrastructure
market in India has just started taking shape. It is still
some years before our broadband infrastructure matures to
the level prevalent in the US or some countries in the Asia
Pacific region. However, broadband is now becoming more and
more relevant here because of the extent of infrastructure
being laid out in the country, indicating a boom time ahead.
What is broadband?
Technically speaking, it is a type of data transmission in
which a single medium can carry several channels simultaneously.
Cable TV, for example, uses broadband transmission. In contrast,
baseband transmission allows only one signal transmission
at a time. Today, most communication between computers, including
the vast majority of LANs, uses baseband transmission. An
exception to this is B-ISDN Network, which employs broadband
transmission. However, in general, the term broadband is used
by many for high bandwidth usage. “Broadband is defined
as high-speed Internet connections that have download speeds
of 128 Kbps or more” According to our experts at Primus
Infocom, hardly 1 percent of the total bandwidth available
is being utilized. In fact there is excess of bandwidth even
in mature markets like the US, where only about 3 percent
of the total capacity is being utilized. “This is happening
because the service/infrastructure providers are going on
adding capacities while there are not many applications to
use that much. Also, the applications in the Indian context
are still very preliminary. Take the case of video conferencing,
which has not yet matured, resulting in users sticking to
36 Kbps applications. Primus Infocom
experts have to say that “There is one set of people
who don’t feel the need for huge bandwidth, and another
set who want more bandwidth but are not willing to pay for
it. So cost also becomes one of the hindering factors in the
Indian market,” We realized the cost factor and so have
come up with Tariff
plans which can benefit customer to the tune of almost
40% as compared to dial up with high speeds (for reference
see Tariff
Plans). In a competitive scenario like this, cost factor
& value addition are going to be the buzzword. Apart from
corporate, it is the home and SME segments that are going
to drive the broadband market in the metros or A-class cities.
In the home segment the drive is going to be through entertainment
and other value-added services.
Out of sheer compulsion, a few years back Indian Railways
introduced computerized reservation. A similar compulsion
will force the government to adopt e-governance, tele-education
and tele-medicine, and business to take up e-commerce. All
this will need broadband, multimedia delivery pipes to homes,
offices and wherever one goes. This in turn will create opportunities
for broadband players.
Market trends
It is important to understand that the prime driver for
broadband, apart from faster downloads, will be overall increase
in productivity and the overall value proposition of being
connected. The end user is now slightly more mature, in the
sense that he is already exposed to using the basic non-bandwidth
intensive applications like chat and e-mail. Corporates are
giving much more Internet-related facilities to users, like
providing everyone with an independent mail ID and a machine
that has Internet access. “Applications like video-on-demand
will storm the market in the coming days which will require
Broadband connection for accessing”. The consumer market
has matured to such a level that its time for the market to
take up broadband significantly. From the overall perspective
though, the market is growing. More and more conventional
mediums at conventional speeds are coming up, and they will
mature and lead the way to broadband. A price fall by Sify
where packages start with just Rs 300 a month has made broadband
more affordable to users.
Present situation
The future of the broadband market in India is still hazy.
Infrastructure in general and access network infrastructure
in particular is the need of the hour, and the moment these
start building up, some experts say the market will explode.
However, others feel the glut in capacity may never be matched
by demand. The lobby that says broadband usage will explode
says content creation and conversion in local languages of
different regions of the country is an industry which is all
set to boom in the coming years. Application development like
distance learning, video on demand, education on demand, home
shopping and interactive gaming will all become big businesses
and create a multiplier effect on the size of the total market.
Since the sky is the limit for applications, we do not see
any saturation in the broadband market for at least the next
25 years.
Here are some projections made by Primus Infocom about Broadband
Subscriber Base. |
