You have heard this before, but broadband is finally taking off in the country. Here are some numbers to prove it. Both Bharti and Sify claim to have signed on about 3,000 customers each in just the last month. If you are in one of those hip metro boroughs like Delhi's Vasant Kunj or Kolkata's Salt Lake, you already have internet on tap for Rs 1,000 or less a month. The overall numbers at about 50,000 are still small, but the speed at which it is spreading is not to be taken lightly.

And who, pray, is offering this? None other than your friendly (umm...unfriendly?) neighbourhood cable operator. The cable operator is just putting another set of wires into the home and networking the colony with the same technology-Ethernet-that offices use to connect computers in a local area network (LAN). The current LAN standards in offices could be using wires called Cat5, which can actually take speeds of about 10 mbps-that is 1,000-times faster than a dial-up connection. How fast is that? Well you can watch a movie at a speed 20th of that-or 0.5 mbps.

For more than four years now, people have been talking of high-speed internet through the cable TV route. But it never really took off because cable TV wires had to be upgraded into taking two-way traffic to offer internet. That also meant that each household had to invest in a cable modem-coughing up about Rs 15,000-20,000-that would convert analog signals from the cable wire into the digital format that a computer could understand.

Now, by connecting household computers into a network-like how computers are connected in an office network-the modem has been made redundant. So you have another wire snaking through your window, but who cares? Another ugly wire hanging outside your building is hardly going to make it look worse than the two (telephone and cable TV) that have already been strung up. As long as we get unmetered internet, bye bye convergence! Would you transact giving out your credit card number on this network? Would you provide services streaming on this network and expect to be paid? Who is managing security on this network? That is another story. As long as we can browse now...

BROADBAND'S BIG PLAYERS

SIFY: This internet company, which was unviable till recently, may have found a viable business model. It has signed up 3,000 customers just the last month. Via trained cable operators, it has connected households to its high-speed backbone. NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS: 13,000 BHARTI: Bharti launched its DSL service less than a year ago across the five states. Delhi, Faridabad and Gurgaon house about half its subscriber base and Bharti is adding 2,000 users monthly in these areas. The number is projected to hit 3,000 a month. NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS: 12,000 BSNL: BSNL is trialling a broadband DSL service along with tech start up Banyan Networks in 22 locations across the country with about 4,000 subscribers. Now the public sector giant wants to invest Rs 100 crore to offer about 100,000 broadband lines. NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS: 4,000 DISHNET: Dishnet was a pioneer in offering broadband using DSL technology. It now claims that it offers its services in 21 cities. It has a deal with basic operators in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Gujarat and Delhi to use their copper lines to offer broadband. NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS: 30,000

A Solution From The Bleeding Edge

So who is driving this? Has the Indian cable operator become a computer hack as well? He has. But he has been taught by the reseller, who has, in turn, been trained by none other than our good old ISPs (internet service providers)-Bharti and Sify. These ISPs were earlier working on an unviable dial-up model where they had to pay up to a basic telephone operator for blocked telephone lines and bandwidth, making their costs far more expensive than what they recovered from consumers. This forced many to pack up their businesses. These ISPs provide their own or leased fibre optic connection till the cable operator. The operator then wires up his entire neighbourhood as a LAN and bingo! We have a broadband network that is being cobbled together Indian style.

Sify has signed up 350 such operators across seven cities at last count. Bharti cannot give us an overall number since it has appointed a few resellers, who, in turn, train large (and urbane) cable operators who, in turn, are expected to train smaller cable operators. But Bharti will quantify that about 100 mbps of bandwidth is being used on its fibre optic cable now just for internet.

If you are living in a posh new building in Gurgaon's DLF City or in Hiranandani Apartments in Mumbai's suburb, you don't even have to see the ugly wire come in through your window. The builders have already wired the building as a LAN using fibre optic cable and basic operators have laid fibre till the building. So the bits are streaming into the home at the speed of light no less. A visitor to Mumbai's Oberoi told this writer that it was less time consuming to walk across to the nearest iWay booth and access the internet instead of paying up a huge amount and wait for the hotel's dial-up to make the connection. So don't be surprised if after this un-metered access proliferates, you find internet booths as commonplace as the std booths.

Internet Unwired

If the wireless operators have their way, you won't even need the wiring. Paying up a flat amount and connecting to the internet wirelessly is cheaper that the plain old dial-up and faster. Don't gasp. It is true. You can take a data cable and connect your cellphone to your computer and access the internet at speeds of 40 kbps and it will cost you upwards of Rs 500 a month. But you may have to re-charge your phone often. You can explore the fixed wireless solution offered by Reliance Infocomm. Or if you have a laptop, you can buy a card that you can stick into the networking slot. It grabs power from there, has its own SIM card (which identifies it to the cellular network), and connects to your mobile operator. That, however, is an expensive option for the card sells at Rs 18,000. But if your flunkie owns a laptop and travels a lot, buy him one. He will work every time he is sitting in the airport lounge. He can even access mail from you sitting in his bed! You will recover your investment in no time. It is also cheaper than paying for his dial-up connection.

According to a September survey by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, almost half the respondents were unhappy with their internet access speeds and were looking for high-speed (128 kbps) always-on connectivity at less than Rs 1,000 per month flat charge. Dial-up access in addition to being low speed and getting disconnected frequently, is also very expensive at Rs 30 per hour (including the telephony charges).

BROADBAND FOR DUMMIES

Broadband refers to telecommunication in which a wide band of frequencies is available to transmit information. Think of it as a highway with several lanes so that more cars can travel at the same time. This allows a lot more data to pass through the (fat) pipes and hence allows video, voice or very heavy graphics to stream into your computer effortlessly. So broadband is measured in terms of the number of bits that can be transmitted through the pipe per second. DSL (Digital Subscriber Line): It's a technology for bringing broadband to homes and small businesses over ordinary copper telephone lines Cable: World wide this is a popular method where a cable modem is used to hook up the pc to a local cable TV line and receive data at upto 1.5 mpbs Ethernet: It's the most widely-installed local area network (LAN) technology that can take up to 10 mbps. In India, cable TV operators are connecting many homes using this technology. This network, in turn, connects to the fiber optic backbone of a large telecom operator.

The Telcos Want Their Share Too

If you have been caught off-guard by all this, you have company. So was bsnl's Prithipal Singh. "We now know there is a huge demand out there," he told us. BSNL has been trialling broadband internet using another technology called DSL, short for digital subscriber loop, which internationally competes with internet through cable. The idea is to use the unused space in the copper telephone wire that comes to your home to get always-on high-speed internet. The technology is to put a small piece of equipment that separates the data from all the copper wires from a few homes, combine them together and send them to a fibre optic data network while the voice from these copper wires go to the plain old telephone systems.

But BSNL had a problem. Its copper in the local loop was too long and had many knots, so internationally available technology could not be used until recently. Enter Banyan Networks, the tech start-up, which was incubated by Professor Ashok JhunJhunwala's tech incubator in IIT-Madras. The start-up worked with Indian conditions and came up with its own version of DSL. BSNL has been trying this technology out in 4,000 homes in 22 locations. It has now woken up to the fact that it has been sitting on a veritable gold mine.

The math works likes this. BSNL has to invest about Rs 10,000 per line, which could come down to Rs 7,500 if volume increases. In return, it gets an average revenue of Rs 2,000 per user per month. This even though the minimum fee was only Rs 850 for upto 0.5 GB of data (markets say that this Rs 850 is to be halved soon). This meant that many users overshot their minimum limits and were ready to pay more. This was an eye opener for BSNL, which now plans to invest Rs 75-100 crore to offer 100,000 DSL lines in all the states that it operates. The user is assured a speed of 128 kbps, which halves if the telephone is being used at the same time as surfing.

Do you smell competition? In other words price falls. Yes, DSL is the technology that incumbent telecom operators use to get more revenue out of their investments. "They leverage their control on the local loop to generate not only voice, but data revenue too," says Kobita Desai, telecom analyst at Gartner. The largest telecom operators in the country-BSNL and MTNL-have about 40 million lines between them.

While the incumbent gets its act together, private operators like Bharti, who have laid some copper lines into homes, are also spreading their risks by launching internet using DSL too. Bharti Telenet, the basic telephony arm of Bharti launched its DSL service less than a year ago and has 13,000 users across five states-Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. "We are at the take-off stage for DSL broadband," says Rajeev Kohli, Chief Executive Officer for the northern region operations of Bharti Telenet, which retails under the Touchtel brand.

Delhi, Faridabad and Gurgaon house about half the subscriber base, and Bharti is adding 2,000 users monthly in these areas. The number is projected to increase to 3,000 from next month as more people learn about the service, which is bundled with its basic telephone offering. "The voice customer is pulling DSL today. DSL will start pulling voice in the near future," says Kohli, reiterating what the technology gurus have predicted for years.

If you have been caught off guard, dear reader, so are the content providers. What is eventually going to drive broadband usage is entertainment and education. So if you are one of those contrarian souls, it may not be a bad time to dotcom or dotcom by any other name.