Even with a decent connection, Internet traffic crawls here. Think of it as trying to water your lawn through a straw, while the neighbors use a garden hose.
Internet traffic entering or leaving India is usually limited to 1Gbps, out of the total 51 gbps the country has for voice and data. A single Gigibit per second (Gbps) is roughly equal to the bandwidth consumed by just 700 high-speed users in the US.
Consequently, India's Internet surfers do a lot of waiting.
But two ambitious projects aim to bring India's total bandwidth to more than 850Gbps for voice and data, so the amount available to Internet users will go up as well. A few years later, India's usable bandwidth is expected to increase even further.
George Zacharias, chief operating officer of Internet service provider Satyam Infoway, says the increased bandwidth will stimulate businesses, such as medical transcription and call centers -- two sectors that now handle a lot of data.
For a country hoping to become a major player in these businesses, India's available bandwidth is simply not enough. The country needs higher overall capacity simply to provide decent speeds to millions of surfers using regular telephone lines.
India's undersea cable bandwidth falls behind that of other large developing countries. Brazil, for instance, had 247Gbps last year -- almost five times India's capacity, according to TeleGeography Inc, a Washington-based telecom research firm.
China could count on 120Gbps last year; Turkey, with just 7 percent of India's population, amassed 41Gbps. By contrast, the US has 1,066Gbps of cable capacity.
The new cable projects may put India on a more respectable footing with its peers.
Two private companies are laying underwater fiber-optic cables between the southern Indian coastal city of Madras and Singapore, the nearest hub in the global Internet backbone.
Of course, higher capacity isn't a cure all for India's problems. Whether the added bandwidth finds its way to individual computer users depends on several factors, said Jessica Marantz, TeleGeography's director of business development.
Wholesale service providers must upgrade their connection equipment, and local Internet service providers must buy -- and sell to users -- greater amounts of bandwidth at cheaper prices.
India will also have to improve wiring in its cities and villages to fully take advantage of these new undersea cables. A number of such projects are under way.
Considering that most Indian Web sites run off servers in the US, Internet users rarely get to see Web pages without frustrating waits.
Downloading the equivalent of a postcard size photograph takes more than 15 seconds; a page filled with photos take much longer.
With the undersea cables bringing in data more quickly, Internet service providers will be able to offer 64Kbps leased-line connections to homes. That same photograph should then take only a second or two to download.
In addition, Internet service providers should be able to reduce prices and drop per-minute telephone charges that are now common. The online population should grow well beyond the current 3 million users, which is 0.3 percent of the population.
One of the two cable projects, a joint venture of Singapore Telecom and India's Bharti group, will start with a capacity of 160Gbps and could expand further.
The project is estimated to cost US$650 million and the first segment should be operational by March.
The other, from Indian Internet service provider DishNet DSL Ltd and New Jersey-based TyCom Ltd, will start at 640Gb. Next June is the target for the first segment of the US$1.25 billion project.
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