Challenges for Internet in India

Low per capita availability of high speed net access is still the ground reality and the ready availability of [relatively] high speed internet is only a big city phenomenon in India so far. And in semi urban and rural India, which account for over 90% of the population, internet is either a novelty or an unknown world. What needs to be built is a positive feedback loop by connecting this large population to the internet so that their aspirations can get molded by the infection of knowledge and they can, in turn, drive the growth of internet as a medium of communication as well as a business. Internet is still seen as a luxury so far and not as an enabler to move up the social and economic value chain. Unless this notion is corrected, it will be hard to make internet access a commodity as it is in the west. The skeptics might say that first solve the problems of water, food and electricity availability in the country and then talk about internet availability but this argument is flawed as information and knowledge has emerged as the biggest enablers and if we can build this ‘soft’ infrastructure, there will be much larger number of brains and hands to solve the problems of basic infrastructure. In 60 years of independence, the successive so called governments in India have not been able to provide basic necessities to all the people and, given the quality of people in Indian politics, future governments will never be able to solve these problems (can we have genetically modified politicians please!) We have to empower the people to solve their own local problems and internet can be one of the mediums to do so. Of course, we have to address some of the structural rigidities to make it happen. Here are some basic thoughts on what tools and ideas can be useful to make it happen:

• Cellular networks have the promise to bridge the connectivity gap as India now has very good wireless network connectivity all across the country. The number of Indians accessing internet through their mobile phones is now over three times those using the PC to connect to the Web. India has 9.27 million internet subscribers as against 31.30 million users who access internet through their mobile handsets—GSM or CDMA—to read and reply to mails, download content and for online transactions, according to latest figures released by telecom regulator Trai. Trai’s figures for the quarter ended March 2007 imply that one out of every five mobile users (there are 165.1 million subscribers to mobile services) in the country connects to the internet through the handset. Technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and WiMAX can be very effective to make this happen. One other possibility is power line internet
  

• Power is another issue as it's not regularly available and can be the biggest impediment in the way of better internet penetration. Low power/battery operated computers hold a much greater promise to bridge this gap.

• The cost of owning and maintaining an end user computing devices (aka computer) is still very high for low income group. One novel concept in this direction that I get to know recently is the idea of NetPC from Novatium, which is a low cost terminal placed at user’s place and connected to central computer to provide internet access. The idea is to provide an internet enabled terminal to users in less than $100 with very low per month subscription cost (less than $5 per month.)
  

• For emerging economies, it might be a good idea to think of applications that do not take connectivity for granted (applications that do not stop working if connectivity is not available and sync the information as and when the connection is available - taking a cue from Adam Bosworth’s old blog) This can be a powerful enabler, especially for educational applications.
  

• Wired networks in India were not built for success - they started cracking as soon as usage starts going up exponentially and required large additional infrastructural investments. If this can be calibrated better going forward, it will be a boon for the country and will give rise to other usages to achieve optimum utilization of network bandwidth.

I am sure some of these ideas can be generalized to some extent for most of the emerging markets and, to use an old cliché, third world countries.