Building India's national Internet backbone
Prerna Agarwal · Communications of the ACM · 1999
Here, I describe the Indian Department of Telecommunications' effort (begun July 1997) to address the country's emerging but potentially enormous demand for Internet infrastructure.The government's official policy is now to accelerate addition of Internet nodes for the department and for two state-owned companies by way of the Ministry of Communication-Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) for international communication bandwidth for users in India, and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) for telecom services in two big cities, Mumbai and New Delhi.The government is also allowing private ISPs to enter the market for the first time and to choose the national and international backbone networks they will use to offer commercial Internet services.The government expects this approach to help boost Indian Internet connections (or sub-India is a geographically vast country, located across the Arabian Sea from Saudi Arabia and Africa to the west and across the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean from Myanmar, Malaysia, and the Indonesian archipelago to the east.Only about 27% of its 980 million people live in its cities; the rest live in the countryside in more than 600,000 villages.The government wants it to link the country's huge rural population, as well as its own district offices and new private ISPs, to the Web and the world.P.K.