India's Vechicle for thrust in information technology
India's Vechicle for thrust in information technology
BACKGROUND
NEW ISP POLICY DECLARED - A NEW
ERA BEGINS
SERVICES IN THE NEW ISP ERA
ISSUES INTERNET ACCESS LINES
ISSUES NATIONAL BACKBONE
INTERNET EXCHANGE
INTERNATIONAL BANDWIDTH - SATELLITE OR FIBRE
CONNECTIVITY
SATELLITE OR FIBRE
GROWTH OF INTERNET SERVICES
Internet services have been offered in India by Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited VSNL) since August 1995. These services which were offered initially from the four metros of Mumbai, New Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai, found excellent demand and were soon expanded to cover a network of 42 nodes being operated by the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) and VSNL by 1998.
Internet growth in India mirrors the trend worldwide, with the service being the fastest growing segment of the telecommunications sector. In India, VSNL has tripled the number of Internet accounts since September 1997 when it was 50,000 to over 150,000 accounts today.
As per the informal policy in vogue, VSNL was allowed to operate only from six gateway nodes, while DOT took on the responsibility of operating nodes from the remaining cities in India. In the process of establishment of 42 nodes, VSNL has set up an India-wide backbone with six direct international outlets for international connectivity. The international connectivity which totals over 8OMbps is provided over diverse media of optical fibre cable systems, e.g., FLAG, SEA-ME-WE-2 in conjunction with other optical fibre Systems around the globe.
6th November 1998 was a landmark day in the history of Internet in India, when a revolutionary new policy was unveiled. The policy permits unlimited number of Internet players with no licence fees for the first five years, thus setting the stage for a completely deregulated operating environment. What should we expect from this new ISP policy?
The answer to the above question would lie in the manner in which some of the most critical issues relating to the Internet scene in India will be addressed. It is not a travesty of truth to say, that a deregulated environment requires the most disciplined set of regulations to oversee the growth and to ensure and protect the interests of the customers and the country It will be important to ensure that no anti-competitive practices are indulged in by any of the operators, particularly those responsible for providing infrastructural facilities.
The opening up of the ISP market will bring in new players over the next three to six months, with some of the most remote comers of India being possibly connected on the Internet, and the base of Internet services expanding exponentially. With the price of multimedia PCs falling to below Rs 3O,OOO/- Internet is expected to see the add-on impact of growth owing to wider availability of services and declining costs. New applications such as Intranets for corporate networking, streaming video and audio, enterprise networks as well as residential use are expected to drive the growth of Internet in India.
A number of issues need to be addressed on priority while implementing the new ISP policy. The expansion of Internet services will lead to a three-fold requirement - the need for more access lines, national backbone as well as international bandwidth.
The most immediate and critical requirement for expansion of Internet in India will be the requirement of access lines to enable customers access Internet servers. With a global standard of 1:10 or better ratio, every million customers in a city will require over 100,000 lines to be available to various ISP’s. With the policy not permitting last mile connectivity for dial-up access, this requirement will need to be met by the operators of basic telecommunications services. Past experience over the last three years has shown the requirement of access lines and their quality to be the most significant limiting factor for the growth of Internet in India. It will need to be seen how this will be overcome under the new liberalised scenario by merely increasing the number of ISPs.
The forecast of online access (source: Financial Times) shows that dial-up access will remain by far the most common method of access outlining cable or ISDN access by a factor of over 10:1. Under these circumstances the policy announcement of opening up Internet access via Cable TV is not believed to provide a radical solution to the issue of access to Internet services. It will require a concerted and planned effort to meet this demand over a short time frame of less than six months.
Another major issue in the provision of Internet services is that of providing a national backbone for India-wide connectivity as well as inter-connection between the multiple ISPs. Under the new policy dispensation, a Statewide access has been provided under the dialling scheme of "17222" access which connects a subscriber to the nearest ISP node. With more than 800 cities in India being available on STD/ ISD and having a high potential for growth of Internet services, the above type of access is likely to lead to a loading of the Indian trunk network which is designed for "high tariff low holding time traffic" with ‘low paying, high holding time traffic". This will undoubtedly put considerable load on the already scarce resources and is not a longterm solution. Moreover, merely providing access to the nearest ISD node does not solve the issue of connecting to more than 50 ISPs who may exist within a State. There is, thus, an urgent need to provide a common access backbone to which customers from any part of the State can dial to access any lSP Internet node. The need is, therefore, to isolate the access service from the ISP service and the content services. A national backbone can be provided by private operators in addition to those provided by DOT and VSNL, and this should form an indispensable part of the National Information infrastructure. No ISP policy would be complete without defining a national infrastructure for India-wide Internet access by multiple ISPs.
Multiple ISPs operating in the country would require a common exchange point for inter-change of traffic flowing between their customer groups and content sites. In other countries, Internet exchanges are provided by major carriers, e.g., MCI WorldCom, UUNet, etc., or are operated as peering points of exchange. In the medium-term, it is desirable that VSNL, which has already set up major infrastructural facilities in the country, be allowed to operate as a national exchange point in addition to the international gateway facility for which most ISPs could eventually need to connect to VSNL.
With the operation of six gateways by VSNL, and in addition the use of optical fibre submarine cables, the bandwidth already provided by VSNL is over 80 MBPS and is adequate for meeting India’s requirements with the current level of subscribers.
India is also well connected with optical fibre cable systems1 with FLAG (5 Gbps per fibre), SEA-ME-WE-3 (10 Gbps per fibre) and other cables in the pipeline. Complemented by multiple satellite connectivity, no shortage is envisaged, and the requirement of all ISPs can be fully met from "day one" so far as international Internet connectivity requirements are concerned. VSNL has already prepared itself for this scenario, whereby its leased lines to the ISPs can be increased to accommodate all the new ISPs requiring connectivity via VSNL. It maybe mentioned that VSNL has today over 350 leased line circuits operating for Internet alone and is, thus, well versed with this business.
It is now well known that Internet growth is not simply a growth in the number of users, web sites or customers. The real growth of Internet is now being driven by an increasing use of bandwidth-hungry applications.
As per Sprint, the average message travelling over its networks is today ten times larger than it was a year ago. Users are downloading larger and larger web pages and using steadily increasing data-hungry applications such as video conferencing, LAN connectivity and enterprise networks. Within the next three years the bandwidth requirement of Internet could grow by a factor of 50 to 100, overtaking the telephone network bandwidth by a significant margin. On the Internet backbone, the traffic is today doubling every 100 days and major backbones at peak times are suffering packet losses which can go up to 400A. The question is how will such large bandwidths be provided for India?
Fortunately, VSNL’s advanced planning in cable systems comes to the rescue of this urgent and pressing issue. VSNL, through its acquisition of capacity in FLAG and SEA-ME-WE-3 can ensure that the country’s requirements are met for the next five years with over 30 Gbps of capacity being available. VSNL has already signed a MOU for Project Oxygen, which will be a 300 Gbps system operational in the year 2000-1.
The increasing number of ISPs in India will drive up the bandwidth demand. This, coupled with larger bandwidth per user through the use of bandwidth-hungry applications, will make it possible to order large bandwidths. This will then provide economies of scale and make the bandwidth available at lower and lower costs.
VSNL is already negotiating for much larger capacities on the optical fibre systems for Internet. India-US connectivity for a D53 (45 Mbps capacity) can today be had at US$ 150,000 per month. This is roughly the equivalent of US$7,000 per month as against an average figure of US$ 21,000 per month payable via satellite circuits to USA. It is, thus, evident that even at relatively lower levels of bandwidth utilisation, e.g., 45Mbps, the cable systems provide a price advantage of 3:1 over satellite circuits. VSNL believes that this will be a significant factor in gradually lowering the cost of Internet access for international Internet connectivity. As the bandwidth requirements increase beyond D53 to ATM levels, e.g., 155 Mbps, the cost could come down further by a factor of 2 or 3, thus reaching levels at which such bandwidths are available in developed countries.
Another factor, which will form a critical decision point for ISPs in India to select cable or satellite connectivity, would be the performance of Internet traffic over satellite circuits. Geo- stationary satellites have a minimum round trip latency of 500 milliseconds and take 700 milliseconds or more with framing delays This can significantly down grade performance on client server applications or transaction- oriented applications on the Internet. It is now well recognised that geo stationary satellites do not work well with fundamental Internet protocols like TCP/IP. Unless implemented with special care, e.g., "large window support", TCP/IP can provide unacceptable performance with wastage of more than 90% of bandwidth on a typical satellite connection owing to queuing delays and congestion control mechanisms. Carriers are today seriously concerned with such performance limitations over satellite Internet delivery, particularly with the advent on the horizon of the next generation Internet protocols, IPV6. The HTTP transaction- oriented protocols as well as the video conferencing hand-shaking protocols (H320 series) also suffer performance limitations over satellite circuits.
Recognising the importance of providing low latency times, most Internet providers are now moving predominantly to all-fibre circuits. As an example, major 1SF carriers guarantee a delay of less than ISO milliseconds end4o-end latency. UUNet guarantees less than 150 milliseconds end-to-end latency for two sites on its network, while AT&T WorldConnect guarantees less than 100 milliseconds latency on its backbone. Other operators have also followed suit, e.g., Sprint guarantees less than 140 milliseconds latency on its backbone, and ANX less than 125 milliseconds end4o-end latency for service provider certification.
It is imperative and virtually certain that quality conscious ISPs in India will also strive to provide latency as per world standards on their networks and backbones. This primarily requires them to offer end-to-end delays of less than 150 milliseconds, which is possible only via all-fibre, cable-derived Internet circuits.
There are also other limitations of an independent satellite gateway which maybe set up by ah ISP. First of all, these provide single-point connectivity out of the country. With many Internet backbones showing up to 40% packet loss at peak time, a single-point connectivity is not considered optimum. The ISPs will, in any case, need to connect to the national backbone for enabling access to their users spread all over India and for exchange of inter-ISP traffic in India. Hence, opting for an earth station does not in itself provide any advantage in terms of connectivity.
Further, a satellite gateway with a projected bandwidth requirement of around lOOMbps over 3 to 4 years will require an investment of around Rs.20 Crores. With the overall shortage of satellite capacity particularly for direct connections to USA, such earth stations will be of limited utility.
VSNL believes that while in the beginning some ISPs may take a short term view of going for satellite connectivity, most lSPs which are aware of the growing bandwidth requirements of Internet and the global standards for latency will opt exclusively for all4ibre international connectivity on their Internet networks. VSNL is, therefore, going ahead with significant acquisitions of Internet capacity to continue to meet requirements of all ISP providers in India through its extensive reach of global fibre networks. In fact, even the existing Internet bandwidth of VSNL will migrate from satellite based connectivity to predominantly all-fibre Internet connectivity.
With the arena now clear for a deregulated and open playing ground for ISPs,
the stage is set for the rapid growth of Internet in India. However, the growth will be
critically dependent on how some of the factors such as requirement of access lines and
national backbone connectivity are addressed. With the wisdom which has gone into the
formulation of the new ISP policy, we do believe that these issues requiring urgent
resolution will also be addressed on priority and resolved, opening up a path for
multi-fold growth in Internet services in India.
For more information on VSNL : visit http://www.vsnl.net.in or http://web.vsnl.net.in
Or visit the site of authorised agent of VSNL - Internet services http://www.balasai.net