What stops internet access from being cheaper in India !!!
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If i am not wrong. Beam and ACT support People are there on the other broadband forum.@mgcarley: If you know anyone from beam personally; can you ask them join the forum and make a visit to this thread. I am a little curious about what beam guys have to say on this.
haris5sani
Galvanizer
Hey mgcarley, when you guys are coming to Delhi/NCR region???
I was hoping ACT or Beam connections should be made pan India.
I was hoping ACT or Beam connections should be made pan India.
Lets assume @mgcarley launches his venture in mid-2013. Then it would easily take more 2-3 years to enter other City.
Till then Beam and ACT will expand in major metro's i assume.
However there are many new ISP's coming up and Few international ISP's Investing here according to some Report.
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mgcarley
Contributor
Just saw your plans, I must say they're fantabulous :bigok: Also, in your *future* plans/roadmap, bhopal falls en-route. When are you landing here? I promise to be the first subscriber
We have a timeline for these areas but there are many conditions that have to be met for it to work.
MPCG is one of the most left out circle in the broadband arena... Don't see any improvement since every ISP neglects it thoroughly 'coz market here is not mature enough....
Yes, I had a shocking time of Internet access last time I was in MP.
Answering the past 4 posts, part of the reason we're looking quite closely at these states is simply because BSNL is basically it.
@mgcarley: If you know anyone from beam personally; can you ask them join the forum and make a visit to this thread. I am a little curious about what beam guys have to say on this.
I doubt the people I know at Beam would be inclined to join in these discussions.
The people I know are probably quite far removed from the support staff, but on IBF I know the username for ACT is "ACTian" - I don't remember Beam's one OTOH if they have one.
I'm confused: why are you using future tense re: Hayai? Or are you referring specifically to Delhi/NCR?
Also, ACT and Beam are basically the same company, but each only hold state-licences for AP and KA at the moment.
Not many new ISPs are coming up and there was quite a long pause on new licenses being issued until quite recently as licenses were being changed. The International ISPs investing are usually investing in existing players, like MTS in to Shyam/Spectra, Maxis in to Aircel and others are part of conglomerates (Vodafone). Axiata WAS going to buy a stake in Tikona but decided against it.
In other cases they're investing only in the wholesale side - Telstra, Pacnet and C&W (soon to be part of Vodafone).
Foreign investment in regular ISPs (that aren't mobile operators or otherwise publicly traded companies) is kind of rare. Other than Tikona, YOU Telecom was invested in by Citigroup (I seem to recall) but I can't think of many others off the top of my head.
And this is the particular reason why any ISP in these places has the most probable chances to rock.
montsa007
Galvanizer
What stops internet access from being cheaper in India !!!
The answer to this question my friend is 1 simple word "J3rks"
BSNL and MTNL have their own goldmine of bandwidth, while Airtel, Vodafone, MTS etc., have to buy from MTNL and BSNL so their costs go up!
BTW I pay 2500/- for 2 months of completely unlimited plan at approx 1-3MBps
The answer to this question my friend is 1 simple word "J3rks"
BSNL and MTNL have their own goldmine of bandwidth, while Airtel, Vodafone, MTS etc., have to buy from MTNL and BSNL so their costs go up!
BTW I pay 2500/- for 2 months of completely unlimited plan at approx 1-3MBps
mgcarley
Contributor
My experience is that the wonderful hierarchial system used by so many companies in India means that the powers that be are about twice as old as their average customer (the largest group of broadband subscribers in India is male and under the age of 35).
In short: there is a massive disconnect between what the guys running the show *think* and what customers really want.
I'm not sure where you are getting your information but neither part of this last sentence is true - the real situation is exactly the opposite.
Airtel: Owns or part-owns 5 submarine cables landing in India, mostly between Singapore and the UK and countries in between.
Tata: Owns or part-owns 3 submarine cables landing in India, spanning the globe.
Reliance: Owns 1 submarine cable system landing in India, spanning the globe.
BSNL: Owns a submarine cable from Tuticorin to Colombo.
MTNL: Doesn't own much, no submarine cables of it's own - there was a plan back in 2008 but no cash.
Vodafone: Vodafone PLC has just purchased Cable and Wireless PLC which is a major worldwide supplier of bandwidth, including it's own network of submarine cables (none touching India yet, but probably not far off).
Added trivia:
BSNL & MTNL: Combined debts of something like 7000Cr and scrambling for bailouts from USOF.
BSNL & MTNL: Huge last mile covering most of the country - doesn't allow private operators to use it and so are missing out on copious revenues and not solving their debt issues.
who told u :drool:
from last 2-3 days I am getting SMS alerts that they are going to update their network .
hope your words are true
How is this possible then?
:: ACT Television ::
Using Beam's Network?
They've bought some New plans AFAIK recently. www.bit.ly/OYWk8n
Updating their network doesn't necessarily mean they're Upgrading plans. May be they're upgrading their Infra For New FTTH plans.
mgcarley
Contributor
Yes and no. Neither Beam nor ACT owns their last mile, but it will be only a cross-licensing deal. As Beam (part of ACT) has a license for AP this is not a problem.
Similarly, YOU doesn't own most of it's last mile but is building. These plans are only available where they have built FTTH, suggested by the disclaimer:
I personally would still view these as 1mbit/s plans with a temporary speed boost for the first 25-55GB... surely at these sorts of speeds they should have higher options available, right?
montsa007
Galvanizer
An internal source who works in a company that supplies backbone services to Vodafone, MTS, Loop, Airtel & other private players, was also a part of 3G stuff.
mgcarley
Contributor
There's not many companies that could be, but unfortunately they're still wrong.
As far as domestic bandwidth is concerned, the story is marginally different but Airtel, Tata, Reliance and Vodafone have significant domestic networks of their own (at least 1 lakh km), as do backbone specialists Railtel (~80k km) and Tulip (~10k km). Aircel's backbone is growing fast (~25k km I think, although they mostly ride on Tata's fibre), Sify's backbone is still around 20k km while Loop, MTS/Spectra and Hathway have bits and pieces around the place.
BSNL's backbone is so often chocka-block with traffic it's about ready to fall over - this can be evidenced by the latencies many customers see at different times of the day, and both providers peering/interconnection links - both voice and data - are quite often saturated.
As for last-mile for the cell towers a lot of the time they'll often lease capacity from a local operator if they can't build their own for whatever reason, but the who depends on where... but a private player buying from MTNL/BSNL? Doubtful - for the simple reason that they are usually way more expensive than anyone else for point to point fibre. I mean 17 lakhs/year for 5km of infrastructure rated at STM-1? Who do they think they are they kidding? I can get dark fibre for a fraction of that and push 10gbit/s over it if I want to... it would have to be an absolute last resort to even be considered.
Also MTNL itself connects 95% of it's towers with wireless (microwave) which supposedly does some 500mbit/s.
sudhanshu123
Contributor
mgcarley,i want to ask you if your business in mumbai is turning healthy profits for you since that (i think) will be the the first requisite for hayai to expand smoothly into other areas of india(for eg. delhi/NCR etc.),or am i wrong to say that?any way currently in delhi i think MTNL is the best ISP(and i have had a miserable experience with Failtel),because of very few down times(if at all they occur) and because they are giving me 4 Mbit speed on a 2 Mbit connection (due to some glitch i guess) and this has been going on for over 2 months now :head2: :hail: :hailand i am leeching the hell out of it,400GB in one month easy,from ahem sites).and any hayai user here?can anyone confirm if a hayai connection is as sweet as it seems?also if one takes hayai's 100 Mbit plan or for this matter even the 1000Mbit plan,than can one even expect to see such speeds being practically "felt" ,will the servers of sites return the favor with such high speeds?
and i am leeching the hell out of it,400GB in one month easy,from ahem sites).and any hayai user here?can anyone confirm if a hayai connection is as sweet as it seems?also if one takes hayai's 100 Mbit plan or for this matter even the 1000Mbit plan,than can one even expect to see such speeds being practically "felt" ,will the servers of sites return the favor with such high speeds?
mgcarley
Contributor
I just realized how wrong the maths is on this post. What you've actually done is contended the bandwidth twice and I somehow managed to miss it earlier (may have been tired).
If the contention ratio is 1:4, then 655/4 = 164 rupees, but that also means 324GB/4 = maximum 81GB per user per megabit sold. Assuming you want to let 100% utilization be on your network (unlikely) so multiply that by 75 percent and get 60GB per user per megabit sold. The higher the contention ratio, the less the allocation per user per megabit (20GB if you want to go to 1:12)... THAT is what you'd get for your 55 rupees...
But add salaries, taxes, equipment, domestic transit (the costs of which are often higher than the international), miscellaneous overheads, operational expenses and profit, average it all out across the entire country and yeah... the cost can very well come up to a few hundred bucks (subject to the metrics of individual companies of course) but in reality, yes, the actual cost of bandwidth in my case only a small percentage of my overall cost of delivery.
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MTNL also loses 700Cr a quarter and BSNL magnitudes more than that, and as government companies both get propped up by the taxpayer.
Cashflow is sufficient, but being that the money used to start the business is not free (as in, we should be paying back the investors and interest on loans and that sort of thing), profit is not yet "relevant" for us in the traditional sense.
Expansion is not a question of profit, it's having the money available to do so - we have some, but not yet enough to come to Delhi (we still have a lot to do in Mumbai), so we are actively seeking our next round of funding. It is probably going to take around 100Cr per metro just to get a decent coverage (that's not even complete, but enough to justify it).
I don't know if any of our users are on TE. I know some are praising us on Twitter recently, none will be on IBF again yet as they're not ready to re-open our section just yet.
In all likelihood, no. 100 or 1000mbit/s is important when you have multiple people doing multiple things - a single user is unlikely to get 1000mbit/s simply because their hardware can't handle it - either due to some bottleneck or in most cases because they buy laptops which only have 100mbit network cards.
Someone with a brand-spanking new PC with SSD hard drives and a powerful processor, yeah, maybe, but the average person probably not. A lot of people are able to get 100 easily enough depending on what they download and from where... you won't get that from a server in the US or Europe or Bittorrent, but there wouldn't be anything stopping you getting multiple 20-30mbit downloads going - I usually get 9-10mbyte/s on bittorrent only when I'm downloading more than 1 file - or using a download manager like Getright.
You *could* get such speeds on a single stream from select sites that are using content delivery networks, but the rest usually comes down to bottlenecks at their end, distance, networks and any number of other reasons. From certain sites they simply have the server rate-limit the speed per connection which makes the use of a download manager necessary (as I already mentioned).
But yes, for a single user, around 30mbit/s is enough. Once you get past around 30mbit/s you need other people to be using it for the speed to be really effective. The point of having this high speed is so that one person can't affect another - 2 people can watch HD video streams at the same time without causing each other to drop out or 1 can download files and the other can watch Youtube at 1080p comfortably no problem.
?dOuBtFiRe?
Galvanizer
Why talk about dreams? 100 mbit...first let them give 1mbit with no FUP. Then we can ask for more.
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