Broadband: Broadening networks to bridge the divide

Broadband is the way to the future. With over 113 million subscribers and the numbers still galloping, China is the largest broadband market in the world.Even the technology driven, home to Silicon Valley, the United States of America, trails behind China with 87 million users. China had only 93.5 million users last year and with in a period of four quarters she added another 20 million users to her subscriber base making her the largest and fastest growing market in the world. Not only this, China, India, Vietnam and Phillippines are the world's High growth potential broadband markets, making Asia the biggest user of Broadband in the world. Last year alone, out of the total new connections,over 53% of the new broadband lines were added in the Asia-Pacific region and the mainland China contributed to over 90% of these total new connections. With India's emerging competitiveness in the IT industry, does this mean a growing area of opportunity for the Indian IT leaders. Should India climb the pyramid to provide more value-added services and focus on developing more technological capabilities. India's ability to tap this emerging market would be greatly determined by the policy-makers successfully meeting the legal and regulatory hiccups enabling the same.

Broadband and related services are here to stay in the Asia-Pacific region. With vast majority of populations still living in rural hinterlands and poor infrastructure, internet remains the best possible way to connect the people. Institutional and regulatory hiccups thwart the growth of this high potential market with difficult barriers to build data centres, lay cables and get licenses, according to analysts at Accenture. Present IT infrastructure too needs upgradation with new applications in mobiles and smartphones, internet enabled TVs and online gaming platforms like Xbox 360 slowing the network and acting like Bandwidth hogs.

Internet is undoubtedly a great connecting factor and with Information as power in the 21st century, connecting the rural areas through stronger bandwidths could well be Asia and particularly ChIndia's panacea to connect its lost crowd in the rural areas. This might as well be the key to 'sustainable growth'. In India, ITC's 'e-Choupal' initiative is one such interesting case study wherein the ITC connected the rural farmers through the power of Internet technology.