The problem is those 8 million are in pockets in a very large country. For a middle class that's supposedly in the 200-350 millions (depending on who you ask), what is 8 million ? More importantly to you what is the growth rate here ?
Growth rate seems to be about 500k a year, if we go strictly by statistics.
8 million isn't a lot going just by the population size but it's also not small enough to ignore. Besides, if we bring more affordable access to the population, potentially the number of subscribers could accelerate.
To use the net one has invest in a PC, that's dependent on disposable income & how erratic the power supply is, in comparison a cellphone is pretty much independent of the nat grid. Its a self-contained platform with a much lower upfront cost. The rate of development is very fast as phones get cheaper and more capable.
The thing with cellphones is that all the most inexpensive ones only support EDGE at best, so no matter how widespread 3G becomes over the next couple of years, they won't be able to take advantage of 3G anyway.
Then there are always new devices similar to cellphones coming out.
Granted, but in some particularly rural areas, we're planning more of a cyber-cafe situation rather than individual subscribers - this allows us to control things like electricity, and since we could do the entire platform on open-source, costs really wouldn't be that high.
The bulk of this country still surfs on a wired connection at work or at school instead of at home
Agreed, but even schools and businesses aren't getting decent connections and they definitely are not cheap! We've got a couple of branches of a school waiting to switch to us from an Airtel leased line.
A school should have probably 512k-1Mbit/s per seat to be on the safe, but they're getting something like 2Mbit/s total as of now and they're doing a lot of video work. Since most of the videos would be streamed or transferred only between campuses, this is a huge opportunity for them to utilize the Hayai Zone.
Sure, but do you have subscriber growth rates to support this investment ?
A city with 200k people in it won't cost very much to cover - we could potentially cover a city of that size with just 1 or 2 PoPs.
I agree it won't work for torrents and the like, thats a different segment. I was talking about light weight apps that work well with mobiles. This is where the potential for use is higher if there were apps out there to compel ppl to spend on the extra bandwidth. That right there given the 100s of millions of phones out there could be the biggest trigger waiting to be tapped.
The big caveat here is I'm talking about apps that do not exist currently for cellphones and therefore the demand isn't there yet.
You might be surprised. As a former resident of Finland, I can assure you that there are hundreds of apps for... all sorts of things... which could easily be licensed from the bright-sparks in that country: if only the bandwidth were available.
Of course, it's hard to say without knowing what types of apps you're thinking of.
And users shouldn't have to "spend extra" - it should be provided at a reasonable cost to begin with. 1GB for Rs100-150 I'd say is fairly reasonable for mobile data. In India, it is definitely possible for the operators to recoup the cost of the 3G spectrum just by shifting as many GBs as possible. Volume counts - if they make data packs too expensive, few will buy and it'll take longer for them to recoup the costs.
Thats a serious obstacle to increasing coverage in the city but not outside where 75% of the country still lives. A revolutoin in broadband, for me, isn't attained by just providing it in cities alone.
I agree, 100%. Hence why I think in those areas either a cyber-cafe sort of deal (dodgy electricity supply) or WiMax can work, or dare I say it, even WiFi. I don't go to rural India too often, but if we're talking about a situation where people can be in one place and get free access on any WiFi-enabled device (it's coming in on some sub-Rs10k cellphones now too), then that *could* be revolutionary. Or even on a wifi-equipped OLPC-type device.
Sure, wireless is a compliment to wired connections but the numbers would dwarf wired connections. Right now the
iPad is a little taste of what wireless computing platforms could look like in the future. Five years from now, there will be a lot of immitators availaible.
In some ways, I sure hope so. When it comes to the point where we are actually planning a rollout to some test-areas of "rural India" (next year?), we can explore every method of distributing the access - the main thing naturally is practicality. It can't be too expensive, the range should be reasonably long and it shouldn't be difficult to get "hooked in". I think that in reality, getting the fiber out there to provide the basic node is probably the least of our problems.
