Connecting rural India is a good business model: Prof Jhunjhunwala

Connecting rural India is not a serious problem, but a

sustainable busi-ness model, opinionated Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT-M,

Chennai. According to him, in order to connect rural India, which comprises

of600,000 plus villages with a population of 700 million people, what oneneeds

is innovation in telecom continuously, which has to be appended byinnova-tion in

business model. "Here the business model should be to aggregate the demand

and get an entrepreneur to drive it," he emphasized.

Prof Jhunjhunwala, who has been working on his dream of ‘To

every man Internet’, fanta-sizes that sooner or later, every home or small

office should have a low bit rate connection for messaging at Rs 100 per month.

A dedicated 33.6 Kbps connection at Rs 250 per month which will enable the-mto

email, browse or do some education or commercial acti-vity. If not,provide every

home with 100 Kbps (dedicated) con-nection at Rs 500 per-month, enabling them to

do video con-ferencing, entertainment, etc.

Still further his dream entails that every home can have 2 Mbps

connection at Rs1,000 per month, thus providing them with video on demand, etc.

But thequestion is, can we get there? "Yes, this dream sho-uld be there in

a year’s time," replied Jhunjhunwala.

According to him, the bottle-neck in this dream project is

ourinternational network, which costs Rs 1,00,000 per month per Mbps (one wayto/from

USA). According to him, if one uses a 100 Kbps conne-ction tocontinuously pull

traffic from a US based server, the inte-rnationalnetwork alone will cost Rs

10,000 per month. This problem has beencomplicated by the fact that Indian ISPs

often connect to each other onlyvia international links. Jhunjhunwala finds it

ridiculous that all trafficwith source and destination in India must take a

route outside India. With-most traffic going to servers located outside India,

the Internetbandwidth becomes costlier.

Jhunjhunwala believe that the China initiative can help in

reducing thecost. China insi-sted that all telecom equip-ment be manufactured

locall-yand it pushed its own standard (IPR) TDS-CDMA as ITU stan-dard. With

thisinitiative, China could reduce royalties being paid to foreigners.

But the big question is does India have the courage to take

similar steps anddevelop next generation mobile technology?

(CyberMedia News Service)