On Saturday 24 September 2005 21:58, Devdas Bhagat wrote:

On 24/09/05 17:30 +0000, Dinesh Joshi wrote:

If you want to see any real improvements, you will have to bypass the telecom operators.

...

I can't see any *real* ISPs. Why is it so? Why is it so difficult for them to provide us with fast connectivity? Are the bandwidth prices so high that they cant afford to give us anything better? Are they just

Oh, bandwidth prices are fairly low. They just don't want to provide end users with low cost bandwidth, because a lot of people would move away from dedicated circuits (or would demand and enforce SLAs at the same price).

Partly true. The real cause is voice circuits and Govt. revenues. ALL governments take a fat fee from the telcos for voice circuits and in return guarantee them a monopoly. If bandwidth is made cheap voip will wipe out the voice revenue. In fact given the price of copper and huge demand for power, it will be cheaper to rip out the copper signal cable and recast it for power distribution while replacing with optical fibre. U will have instant 1gbps bandwidth. That is what S'pore and Korea have in the pipeline. Ofcourse that would be the end of the telephony companies. In India things are skewed even worse. The copper infrastructure was setup with taxpayers money, on which the DOT (and phone vendors like Bharati telecom, ITI) made insane amounts of money. The government then sold off parts of their equity and pocketed the taxpayers money for such noble purposes as rural telcom. The original players retain the last mile network, in effect being a major stumbling block for other telecos and competing with private companies using public money. The TRAI and telecom mandarins refuse to share their last mile circuits with other service providers and have made it illegal to provide any telecom service without paying licence fees. In the guise of protecting the public the government has effectively held them to ransom, allowing a few players to profit.

rgds jtd