Multiple submarine cables with multiple landing stations, owned by different entities, don’t offer competitive wholesale international bandwidth in India. Today a chunk of 10-gigabytes bandwidth varies between $5 million and $9 million in India while it’s being sold from $1.5 million to $1.7 million in other Asian markets. It’s a huge challenge for the world’s fastest growing telecoms market where broadband penetration remains a national embarrassment.
By Payal Malik (Senior Researcher, LIRNEasia) The Indian Express: Op-Ed October 31, 2005 TRAI has recently come out with its recommendations on Growth of Telecom services in Rural India (www.trai.gov.in). It is an insightful attempt to address the anomalies of the current universal service obligation (USO) regime for the provision of rural telephone subsidy.