Shanthi Kannan Fall-out of BSNL high-speed broadband
Will result in better connectivity Employees can work from remote places CHENNAI: The move by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) to upgrade its existing 256 kbps DSL (digital subscriber line) customers to 2 Mbps connections without any additional cost has come in as big boon to end-users. Since BSNL has a huge last mile reach, this will benefit the entire country. The SOHO (small office home office) segment and home users will benefit a lot, say IT industry sources. The country's dominant provider of fixed line telephony services the state-owned BSNL will next year upgrade its lowest speed broadband connections free of charge. He said that all users of BSNL's current 256 kbps downstream DSL service would see its speeds boosted to 2 Mbps in 2007 as part of the government's plans to ramp up broadband use and reach its target of signing up nine million high speed Internet users by the end of 2007. K. Chandrashekaran, Assistant Vice-President, Cognizant, said that this would create a huge online business for the media industry that catered to high bandwidth applications such as movies, multi-media and gaming. From an enterprise stand point, this would encourage organisations to look at working from home seriously as the performance should be much better than now, he said. Web content was a key to the growth of Internet usage. Content and applications in local languages and hosting the content in India were vital for Internet usage. So, there was a need to do more for this segment, he added. Changing applications R. K. Kayyar, Vice President & Head (Technology Solutions), California Software Co. Ltd. (Calsoft), said the nature of applications was changing with more voice and video services being consumed. This new service from BSNL would help in spreading these services. This would help the company to have some redundancy in its networks, which, in turn, would result in better connectivity to its customers. The employees would also be able to work from remote places. The broadband services were at present provided by BSNL, MTNL, Airtel, Reliance, Tata and Sify. Earlier this month, the Internet Service Providers' Association of India (ISPAI) had asked the Government to exempt broadband services from service tax for five years in a bid to boost usage and meet targets. According to official reports, there were a little over 1.5 million broadband users in India at the end of June 2006. www.thehindu.com -- Thanks, Amit Bhatt Voice-Off: 1-800-566-4604 Ext 560 Mob: +91 935-006-3109 "A player that makes a team great is more valuable than a great player" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Click to receive help removing your credit card debt http://tags.bluebottle.com/fc/KCuXzzVNDwqa9JXBpGyIKRoTj00Eiy/ To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
