Bandwidth gains

Things are beginning to happen on the bandwidth front. Just last weeks, two key initiatives were launched in two southern cities, which will substantially increase the bandwidth availability.

Early last week, one of the major submarine cable links, SAFE (South Africa Far East) inaugurated its landing point at Kochi, the commercial capital of Kerala. A few days later, on the East coast, the Bharti Group, announced the launch of its submarine optical fiber cable network to connect Chennai and Mumbai with Singapore. Bharti, the telecom major, is taking up this project in a joint venture with Singapore Telecom. Dishnet DSL is also planning to link Chennai with Singapore through a submarine cable and has reached an agreement with Tycom, an advanced broadband provider, to increase the bandwidth availability in the country.

The 'Operation Bandwidth' initiative announced last year by Nasscom has apparently spurred the interest in this sector. Bharti's project is ambitious. The 10,300-km cable link, costing around $ 650 million (Rs 3,000 crore), partly on land and mostly under the sea, will provide more capacity to the bandwidth hungry Indian companies. Alcatel is taking up the 3,200-km Chennai-Singapore link on turnkey basis and commercial traffic is expected to commence early next year. Bharti hopes to offer a bandwidth capacity of 8.4 terabits per second.

Bharti is supplementing the efforts by laying another 10,000 km cable on land across the country. This Rs 1,000-crore project is expected to be completed in two years. The Mumbai-Chennai link will be made operational in mid-2002.

This is certainly good news for the IT industry. The software industry has been desperate for bandwidth. Software development centers have come up in a big way in the country and global majors expect to benefit from the vast reservoir of software professionals in the country. However, the data flow between the development centers in our country and the world has been restricted by the limited capacity of outbound telecom networks. The restrictions have somewhat limited the ability of Indian companies to take up major works which require strict adherence to deadlines. 

Similarly, the landing point of the SAFE cable link in Kochi is likely to spur the IT industry in Kerala. Anticipating the availability of increased bandwidth, the Kerala government has embarked on a major program to attract software companies to the state. Kerala government agencies are setting up two huge software parks to make available ready-made building infrastructure at Kochi. 

With increased bandwidth availability, Indian companies, in addition to the software services market, can hope to capture a big chunk of the $ 70 billion demand for digital animation in the global entertainment industry. India is already the second largest global producer of entertainment software and now the challenge lies in leveraging these strengths with digital technologies and optimal use of infrastructure. Despite a late start, the nation's 'Operation Bandwidth' seems to have hitched on to a bright start.