Ajay Kalra believed he was well and truly wired. Just a month back he had invested "big money" (almost Rs 1.2 lakh) to set up a heavy-duty pentium II running at 450 Mhz with a high-end modem and an Internet connection.The gleaming new equipment lying at his study table made the 32-year-old private tour operator feel good. His evenings were made - or so he thought - to surf the vast, virtual plains of cyberspace. Today the only surfing Kalra does is run through the 30-odd channels his cable TV operator provides and his PC lies under a shroud of polythene. The reason: all his time on the computer was spent fruitlessly trying to access the Net. Sometimes the phone would keep ringing, sometimes there would be no prompt, at other times just when you thought you were getting somewhere no data would get downloaded. Says Kalra: "It was the most frustrating month of my life."Kalra isn't alone. Thousands of other Internet users in the country today gaze wearily at the "no carrier available" message on their screens wondering where they are stuck in the amorphous cloud of interconnected networks. In Delhi, for instance, at peak hours you have to attempt 25 to 30 times before you can gain access to the Net. So much so that the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) help-desk phone lines log in a daily quota of virulent abuses from users. .preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}What's worse is that even after you get in, surfing becomes painstakingly slow as data drips like molasses onto your computer screen, sometimes taking up to half an hour to create a single page of text and graphics. It's also troublesome trying to download a five-minute video clip - Net addicts are known to take in a movie, may be go out for a meal while the phone line churns away."The service is bad - something needs to be done," concedes Narender Sharma, secretary of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, who is tipped to become the next VSNL chief. One way perhaps is to break the VSNL monopoly. Last week Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee announced that free licences for Internet service providers (ISPs) would be given within a week. He said the Government was committed "to a proliferation of quality Internet service at affordable prices". But experts aren't so sure. In India, most of the Internet access problems stem from choked phone lines and the fact that VSNL is run like any other inefficient government department.Click here to EnlargeConsider what happens when you try to get into the Net - first the modem in your PC changes your commands which are in digital mode into electromagnetic waves. These waves are then pushed into the huge jungle of cable that makes up the telephone network of your city.Your commands move from exchange to exchange before finally arriving at the VSNL building. There, VSNL modems receive your commands (popularly known as the handshake), translate them back into digital mode and push them through their computers into the Net and on to other servers.Sounds simple. But in actuality it's fraught with stumbling blocks. Choked telephone exchanges do not allow VSNL enough lines to cater to an explosive growth of subscribers. VSNL claims that its average access ratio is 1:15 (Net experts put it at 1:25) - which means it has one telephone line to its modems and computers for every 15 subscribers. Internationally, the norm is usually less than 1:10. In fact the growth of the Net in India is linked to the low telephone density here - a mere 1.2 per cent compared to the world average of 10 per cent. Admits Amitabh Kumar, acting chairman and managing director of VSNL: "That is our major problem. We don't get enough lines to match the growth." VSNL has 1.5 lakh subscribers since it started the Internet service in August 1996. Out of this, 90,000 have been added only since January this year. Due to this explosive growth, there are traffic jams in the electronic alleyways leading to incessant busy tones when an Internet subscriber tries to dial in.The other problem is the way VSNL manages its own network. A frequent complaint among users is that often even after the VSNL modem picks up the signal one doesn't get a prompt. Experts point out that this happens when incoming calls while entering a hunting loop of modems stumble on to one that is faulty. Usually, incoming calls should automatically reject the modem that isn't working and move on to the others. However, experts point out that in VSNL the incoming calls keep getting caught in the same loop where the faulty modem lies, leaving a sea of unused modems. "The bottomline is that VSNL isn't competent enough to handle the large growth," says Ashish Gulati, an entrepreneur who offers a variety of services on the Net. Most experts say this kind of inefficiency angers because it can be easily rectified - by better monitoring of its local area network. "This is the kind of callous attitude you get when you know you have a monopoly - there is no pressure to improve," says one of them.Then there are problems which are international in nature. One of them is bandwidth - or simply data-carrying capacity. Data is measured in kilobits per second (KBPS) and the usual speed available to a subscriber is 33.6 KBPS. Now, 33.6 is a reasonably fast speed to surf on. But one doesn't get to that speed. VSNL's international bandwidth is currently 80 mega KBPS - but divide that among their 10,000 lines and at peak hours you end up with a speed of 8 KBPS per user. The international norm is about double that. Bandwidth can be expanded, trouble is it costs big money. The low priority to the Internet has ensured the VSNL'S cautious approach on bandwidth expansion.Therein lies the problem. Says Aslam Shems, a cyber guru who runs a web-designing company in Delhi: "By not making Internet a priority we are losing out on a revolution that is changing everything." As of now, the vision of the Net as a cheap, shared network is nothing more than an egalitarian dream. Look at the price: taking an average of only two Internet hours a day it comes to Rs 1,200. Add to this Rs 1,000 (the telephone charge) and it comes to Rs 2,200. Compare this to the US - local calls there are free - which offers unlimited access for only $20 (Rs 850) a month. And this is without even considering factors like purchasing power: $20 is a trivial sum in the US compared to Rs 2,200 in India.Most experts believe that private ISPs aren't going to act like a magic wand that will solve everything. Says Vibhu Goel of Delhi-based Combit Advertising Network Ltd, which plans to become an ISP player: "For the moment, we'll just be reselling VSNL bandwidth." And nobody's sure just how cheap the service will become. Besides, all other problems - like choked phones and a badly managed VSNL network - will remain. Before that changes, quick Internet access will always remain a dream.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 16, 1998--- ENDS ---
