With increasing broadband penetration and more enterprises [SMEs] being wired towards unified communications regime, Does India have enough backhaul to cater for data growth ? Yes, there are large trunk routes owned by BSNL, Bharti, Reliance, PowerGrid, RailTel, Tata, etc and the companies are constantly building more. Between the key cities, virtually every operator has their own pipes.
So it appears that most Indians will be connected and with the implementation of NIXI, internal data gets routed extremely efficiently. What about Global bandwidth connecting India ? Does India have enough submarine cable links? No, but this segment is growing. More and more cables are being laid at the moment and compression technologies are constantly improving.
Forecasting bandwidth growth has been a major challenege for everyone. At the Enterprise level, this is much easier to do, but at the consumer level, it is growing at a much faster rate than anticipate. And a 20% drop in bandwidth price YoY helps the end customers. However, the Intra-Asia rates remain high, an STM-1 pipe within US-Europe is around US$300-400k, vs US$2.5mn within Asia.
