The Net Effect

By 2003, it is expected that there would be 500 million people online out of which more than half of it would access the net via non-PC devices taking the number of wireless net subscribers to 330 million. About 5 percent of the global sales would be done online doing B2C transactions worth $150 billion and B2B transactions worth $3 trillion. The exponential growth in bandwidth, users and access devices has already resulted in a 'Net Effect', which would give immense opportunities with application packages giving way to services, proprietary nature giving way to openness and desktops giving way to other access devices, said Vishal Dhupar, Director, Sun Microsystems India. All we have to do is leverage on the Net Effect and run our businesses on open scalable platforms.

But in order to leverage on the Net Effect, India would need to add 200 million telecom and Internet connections. For that, the installation cost of telephone lines should come down from Rs 30,000 to Rs 10,000 per line, said Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Head, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras. He delineated IIT Madras' TeNeT groups' efforts in this direction, which has developed a number of access products and brought down the costs per line to Rs 18,000. n-LOGUE, a company incubated by the TeNeT group with the aim of connecting small towns and rural areas in India by voice and net, has already connected 65 villages, he said.

Continuing in the same vein, Vijay Yadav, Country Manager, 3CommWorks, said that most of the net effect would be through voice in the future as IP telephony reduced costs and created a new set of revenue generating services such as PC to phone based on SIP and managed IP services that includes unified messaging, conferencing and network based call centers.