Desperate need to boost our bandwidth

As it is there was a demand for higher and higher bandwidth in the past, but the post-Covid world will see us wanting the same at stratospheric levels, what with a rising WFH culture, a burgeoning mobile work force and the need for online collaboration reaching unprecedented levels.

At the turn of the century the then NASSCOM President, late Dewang Mehta, grandly declared that India needed Roti, Kapda, Makaan, Bijli aur Bandwidth. (Food, clothing, shelter, electricity and bandwidth). While at that time it seemed a bit unusual, it now seems prophetic. India removed record people out of poverty in the 2010s. That was set back by the Covid pandemic-lockdown-recession, but hopefully we will bounce back in 2021. We are on course for 100% electrification by 2022. Thanks to the concept of mobile broadband, it is now actually possible to aspire that each Indian citizen has high bandwidth levels. But for that a lot still has to be done at the infrastructure level.

Enough! Let’s just get in 5G… now! When 4G was coming they promised us 100Mbps though that did not practically happen in most places. That way 5G promises us an upper theoretical limit of 10Gbps. Even if we get a fraction of that, then it would be a great leap forward. 5G has been lagging so much and delayed so much that it has almost become a joke. But maybe now the time has finally come. First Mukesh Ambani announced in the Reliance Annual General Body Meeting that they can implement 5G within a year of getting the contract. Even if they first start in city centres, or they divide the country into zones and give it to all the players, it might be enough. 5G is very capital intensive, requiring smaller and a greater number of towers. Difficult in a recession; could be handy and give a lot of jobs and contracts in a post-recession building up phase. The government should just announce the auction this year and let the 5G world roll out in the 2020s.

More fibre in the diet: This year we finally have a 2300km underwater optical fibre cable connecting Chennai with the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. What took it so long? Why can’t we lay optical fibre to all the remote regions of India? Come to think of it, some populated areas still don’t have fibre. That way we at least have the Bharat Broadband Network launched in 2012. It aimed to give 100 Mbps to all 250,000 gram panchayats (625,000 villages). They were planning to complete that by 2022 also the year when India was supposed to be fully electrified. If that happens then India would go truly digital, but the Covid crisis has set that back by a bit. In the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, companies laid far more Internet cable than was needed. It seemed a waste when the bust happened, but that is exactly what powered the next boom. India needs to be fully cable-ized. Complete digitization will automatically follow.

What about satellite Internet? Once satellite phones were popular, but what about satellite Internet? SpaceX’s ">Starlink project plans tens of thousands of satellites in Low Earth Orbit to provide Internet services. Similar projects have been considered by Amazon (Project Kuiper), Samsung and Telesat. OneWeb and Airtel have announced a tie-up for the same. There are many more such innovations which people have thought of like Wi-Fi towers for rural areas and even blimps. Some talk of drones for temporary Internet service.

Either way the post-Covid 2020s are going to see an appetite for broadband that will keep increasing and we need a buffet of solutions to deal with that. Fast! There are many reasons for this. If bandwidth issues are not sorted out then a lot of work operations will start choking. A look at some of the spikes…

1. Collaboration: The world is Zooming ahead with collaboration tools and even if we return back to normalcy, video calls will continue due to cost factors and convenience. In fact if 3D collaboration becomes popular, bandwidth will become even more of an issue.

2. OTT: Netflix. Amazon Prime. Hotstar Disney+. A host of Hindi and regional language players. Like cable channels we have multiple OTT channels and millions of new accounts have been added during lockdown which will continue being consumers even afterward.

3. Work For Home: Let’s face it, many jobs have already been permanently WFHed. Also these jobs will slowly shift to Tier II/III towns and there will be great requirements for bandwidth there too.

4. Mobile workforce: This crossed the one billion mark some time back and we are accelerating toward 2 billion. The smartphone has become a powerful computer and requires as much bandwidth.

5. Online education: While online schools may not catch on (except in remote areas) online colleges which get government accreditation and may end up being far affordable than expensive offline ones.

6. Mobile apps and e-commerce: This combo has become a superhit and both are proliferating at record levels. The data is always on to order, monitoring is always on, GPS is always on. Data has to be a continuous large pipe.

7. Cloud: With more and more stuff moving to the cloud, there will be more need the keep accessing that data from multiple locations. Cloud means movement of data is much higher than usual.

8. Connected cars and drones: With no touch technology and social distancing this will also take off. Right now legislation, not technology, is keeping them back. Driverless cars will also make their debut.

There are also many other emerging technologies like VR/AR which could be implemented in a much larger way requiring even more bandwidth.