In FY 2002-03, the total broadband services market was estimated to be Rs 350 crore, which comprised of DSL, cable, Metro Ethernet, and fixed wireless. On the DSL front, Dishnet DSL has a monopoly but it seems carriers are also waking up and are planning to provide DSL. Tata and Reliance have very aggressive plans on broadband and they are presently testing newer technologies and are likely to deploy them at the earliest.

l Bharti Infotel: To start with, Bharti Infotel is focusing only on DSL services and presently has a subscriber base of around 39,000. The company has recently announced the launch of Wi-Fi service over DSL in Delhi, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka circles. With this launch Infotel, has become the country’s first fixed line service provider to offer wireless broadband services for residential and SME customers. Presently, one can get a minimum speed of 128 kbps.

In addition, Bharti Infotel also plans to foray into the fourth generation broadband wireless services. The company has conducted successful trials in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Cochin. Using fourth generation broadband wireless service one can expect speeds of up to 2 Mbps. Here, Infotel is planning to use Bharti Cellular’s base station. The company is planning to launch services in 10 cities. This is based on radio frequency and would operate on 2.6 MHz frequency band.

l BSNL: The incumbent carrier has been providing broadband services on a pilot basis in three cities—Kolkata, Pune, and Bangalore. The services are being provided by I-Spatial Communications (P) Ltd  (I-Spatial or ICPL), a value added service franchise of BSNL.

Based on DSL technology, the company is proving broadband services in partnership with partners such as Nortel Networks, Paradyne, Orca Interactive, Silicon Graphics, and Kasenna. The broadband technology from I-Spatial is based on Etherloop (R) technology, which harnesses the latent power of copper media and eliminates any interference of poor quality copper.

Recently, BSNL and KT Corporation have signed a memorandum of understanding to work on broadband Internet business in India. Both the companies have agreed to share resources, know how, and capability to operate broadband business in India. This will give a big push to broadband as BSNL has around 35 million wireline customers which can be used to provide DSL-based services with a small incremental cost.

l Reliance Infocomm: Though, India has achieved a respectable ranking of seven in terms of tele-density, on the broadband front, the figure stands at 0.02 per 100 people. It seems that Reliance is now working on changing the overall landscape of broadband in the country. This task was supposed to have been accomplished by incumbent operators like MTNL and BSNL who already have a lot of copper in place. To start with, the company is looking at providing broadband for enterprises.

Broadband for enterprise is well underway as presently it is undergoing trial run in Reliance Infocomm and other group companies. Presently these are working flawlessly and the response is positive.

In the first phase, the company is looking at 52 cities as large part of business buildings in these cities have been connected by optical fiber cable based on Gigabit Ethernet technology. All this will help in providing bandwidth hungry applications to corporates.

In a year’s time, close to 200,000 buildings will be broadband connected, at the current pace of laying fiber to building complexes. BSNL already has a presence in a large number of these buildings, while private players are present in some. But in many buildings, the last mile fiber is not yet there. So, expectations are that the company will try to reach a million customers in few months or in a year’s time frame depending upon acceptability of broadband services by corporate customers.

On the technology front, the company is opting for different technologies like Gigabit Ethernet, LMDS, DSL, and cable TV, but Infocomm’s major thrust is on Ethernet. DSL as a technology is too much dependent on copper.

Reliance Infocomm, being a new player does not have a legacy network based on copper cable. So, the company’s broadband focus is more on Ethernet. On Ethernet, speeds of 100 Mbps are possible, as compared to the 11 Mbps speed on DSL.

In the conventional system, one can experience problem in video conferencing kind of applications but gigabit Ethernet helps in providing unconstrained bandwidth and one can even surf the Internet at blazing speeds.

In order to utilize the full capacity of the network, Reliance Infocomm is planning to launch consumer convergence solutions by providing high speed Ethernet links to 80 million homes. The company is looking to provide connectivity to this huge base of users in FY 2004–05.

This revolution will help in providing every home with a range of television channels, high-speed telephony, audio conferencing, video conferencing, audio on demand, and video on demand. On this front, the company is working along with Microsoft and is also testing other technologies so that it can also lay its hand on the very big entertainment market.

l Tata Group: In the case of Tata, VSNL will be the front end for broadband. So, VSNL will have Tata Internet, Dishnet DSL (if the company plans to acquire after due diligence), and Tata Power’s broadband division that has a 600 km OFC network across Mumbai and Pune. The company is looking at all the technologies—Internet cable, Ethernet, and DSL for providing broadband services in the country.

The company has also announced the launch of Internet services through cable TV network in Mumbai. The company has tied up with several local cable operators who have agreed to connect several homes to VSNL’s Internet service through their existing coaxial cable network. And very soon, VSNL is planning to launch this service in more cities.

Presently, the company is offering DSL/ADSL services in conjunction with Dishnet DSL. The services are available in all its six circles—Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. The company has also got LoI for Kolkata, Rajasthan, Bihar, Orissa, UP (East), Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. All these circles will also have broadband services by the end of this year.

Presently, the Maharashtra arm of Tata Teleservices has been very active on the broadband front. Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) has implemented a fiber-to-the-business (FTTB) strategy by laying fiber optic cable or PMP broadband radio right up to the premises of its customers giving them high bandwidth scalability.