For example, many users feel the reliability of new applications is an issue that delays decisions. But most applications that they mention are quite mature globally and are deployed by large number of organizations. On closer scrutiny it is revealed that it is not really the application "reliability" that bothers them, but the "speed" of the application that they are worried about. The culprit: Neither the application nor the integrators. It is bandwidth. This is too common. Many companies today delay application deployment because of bandwidth constraint. Those who have been more optimistic and have gone for the new bandwidth-hungry applications on wide area have suffered.

Today, many organizations have implemented high-speed LANs. A large number of them have gone for Fast Ethernet and quite a few for Gigabit. In the applications that are restricted to local area, this has eased down things. But it has created more problems for the wide area. Users now want to use these applications on a wide area basis. Internet access is now available to all. Many organizations have the facilities today for Internet access through the
LAN by almost everybody in the organization. A 128 Kbps leased-line is used sometimes by as many as 150 users.
You can imagine the speed! A simple e-mail application gets stuck.

But we Indians are very familiar with scarcity. What really hampers the market growth is the user's perception. As the oft-repeated saying goes, the maximum bandwidth that you have is the bandwidth of the thinnest pipe, anywhere in your network. In India, that thin pipe is in the middle. We have global bandwidth providers like SEA-ME WE2 and FLAG, who have huge capacities available with them. Project Oxygen is also focusing a lot on India.

That is on the global side. On the enterprise side, the decision is really in the hands of the users. It is the national bandwidth availability that is an issue. Though the DoT says it has enough bandwidth available with it, few believe that it really understands the magnitude of the requirement. The perception stems from the fact that getting bandwidth from DoT is a project by itself. Getting a 2MB leased-line today takes so much of effort. As a result, many users today refuse to take the risk of technology and applications as they feel bandwidth will not be available in time for them to run their applications. Despite the bullish outlook projected by researchers for the telecom market, many users refuse to believe that situation will improve drastically even in the next few years, let alone months.

More grave is the situation of new investors who are looking at India for the investment of remote back office and other communication-enabled services like call centres and Internet data centres. Says P Swaroop, head of IT at Hewlett-Packard India on record, "HP wants to set up a global contact centre in India. But we find there is a severe bandwidth issue." In the long run, this will not only hamper India's dream of becoming a global IT superpower, but will also hamper the employment generation from these services. The NASSCOM-McKinsey study, for example, estimates that there might be an employment loss of about 3,50,000 in IT-enabled services alone, because of the lack of bandwidth.