I think ISPs in USA and Eurpoe buy connections in multiples of 1 Gig lines to the internet exchange at flat rate and hence their cost of data interchange is low compared with what NIXI is charging from Indian ISPs. Here in India the mess starts at the very foundation i.e. NIXI. In our country prices of cellphone services came down drastically when interconnect charges between various operators were cut in 2002. Same can happen with broadband service providers also.
I am sorry to say that the price that mgcarley is proposing to offer is not exactly revolutionary. But competition is good and if the prices don't go down with more competition, at least quality of service of existing operators will improve.
Way back in 1990's we used to have government owned banks providing terrible service to the customers. Now the service standard of even a State Bank of India has improved because they have been pushed by likes of
ICICI Bank and HDFC bank. The same may happen when more players enter the market with their offerings. Prices will come down, sooner or later.
Despite all odds I am hanging my hat on the wimax providers, at least 4 of whom will be able to start service in next 1 year or so after the auction for spectrum in August.
I agree. It's not designed to be revolutionary by comparison with the rest of the world, just with the rest of India. A 24Mbps unlimited connection for Rs 500 would be revolutionary!
NIXI isn't the primary culprit here - although it really isn't helping. NIXI is, essentially, a consortium of all the major players - as such, it's kind of their fault, as they ALSO own the international cables. The general idea behind NIXI is "if you want to peer with us, you can pay for it". Naturally, the rates are exorbitant and thus stifle independent ISPs ability to compete properly.
We want to scare the pants off of the competition by providing superior service for the same-or-less price as they do. It causes customers to ask questions, and when they do that, the competition really heats up, and we'll have to keep ahead simply by staying the fastest and with the fewest restrictions.
Networks are, after all, designed to be used. Reliance,
Tata et al have all this capacity, why not use it? The hardware itself has only got a shelf life of maybe 50 years if they really stretch it, but they're not even close. They could be offering so much more (4x as much speed and they'd be sitting only at maybe 50% capacity) - but they just aren't.
So people like myself who have recently immigrated to India from Europe and who desperately miss having many megabits available need to come in and say "I want a decent internet connection!"
It's not necessarily about number of players - there are countless small ISPs around, but the problem is, they all offer the same rubbish connections. Someone needed to come in and say "256kbps just IS NOT ENOUGH" - the subject line of this thread says it all, and that is, in essence, what I'm trying to do here.
WiMax is technically not a licensed spectrum - maybe you are thinking of 3G? That auction should have been over this time last year, but... well, the Indian government is VERY serious about "flex time" (Did we say May 31st? Sorry, we meant December 12th!)
In any case, within my network, we are considering the use of WiMax only for secondary or temporary access (until we can finish laying our fibre). It's OK, but again, WiMax is not a technology that I would suggest using as a backbone or running multiple connections over, yet some providers are using it as such.
I recently ran into a friend who had previously had Hathway in their building (Worli). Turns out, that cable connection was actually distributed throughout the building from a WiMax installation, and they tell me it was utter rubbish. I believe they now use MTNL.
Every other country that has WiMax or similar installations that *I* have seen are using it on a per-user basis, rather than as a backbone - much the way everyone has their own satellite dishes, everyone should have their own WiMax equipment.
It's a nice idea, in theory, anyway. So the installation charges would go up: you might have to pay Rs 2,500 instead of Rs 500. But the way I see it, people are perfectly willing to fork out Rs 2,500 on their Netsetter/Photon+/Netconnect+/EVDO devices, so this probably wouldn't pose a huge issue - and at the end of the day, the speed of the connection is improved because each WiMax install is handling one user only, which would usually mean less latency as well.
I moved to Europe for faster Internet... now I'm in India, I have to build my own network. This just keeps getting better
