South Asia lagging behind to hop on broadband bandwagon
HOME to some 1.5 billion people, South Asia is paying a high price to
access the Internet as service providers have been slow to deliver
cheaper broadband connections, analysts say.
The region has embraced telephones, mobile phones and computers and
India has flourishing software and outsourcing industry, noted industry
watchers at the first South Asia Broadband Congress here earlier this
month.
But South Asia has lagged behind in hopping onto the broadband
bandwagon, observed Sanjay Gupta of India’s Midas Communication
Technology.
“There’s not enough local language content and affordable
connections. Currently, broadband penetration is very low — estimated to
be less than three percent in the region — and it boils down to cost,”
Gupta said.
Home users in Pakistan pay the most in the region, with annual
broadband prices of 2,660 dollars, followed by Bangladesh at 2,066
dollars, according to Colombo-based LIRNEasia, a regional telecom
think-tank.
The same service costs 242 dollars in Sri Lanka, 223 dollars in India
and 112 dollars in Maldives, said researchers at LIRNEasia, who are
studying reasons for poor broadband penetration in South Asia.
In March, India logged 40 million Internet subscribers, which
included 2.3million broadband users, according to India’s Department of
Telecommunications.
“India needs to target 100 million broadband users by 2015 to connect
homes in remote villages. To do that, operators must bring down prices,”
said Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the Indian Institute of Technology.
“Rural broadband expansion throughout South Asia will help in
education, provide remote healthcare and promote call centres in
villages so computer literate people will not be forced to migrate to
urban areas,” he said.
However, telecommunications operators need to cooperate to make
broadband economically viable in developing countries, said Mallikarjun
Rao, a director at Canadian telecoms giant Nortel Ltd.
“To leapfrog to the next generation, dominant operators must allow
other operators access to its telephone exchanges — so-called local loop
unbundling,” Roa said.
“The local loop is the crucial link between telephone exchanges and
homes,” he said.
Unbundling the local loop or sharing the copper wire allows other
operators to plug their equipment into the telephone exchange and offer
faster services.
Holding back the development of broadband in Sri Lanka, for instance,
is the fact that the country only allows the dominant operator,
state-run Sri Lanka Telecom, to lay copper. AFP |