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Operation Flood

VSNL begins the countdown to the inevitable
rocketing of the Internet in India

The Videsh Sanchar Nigam is bracing itself for the expected flood of Indian Internet users. And plans are afoot to increase access quality, speed and ease of connection to its servers. It's officially dubbed Operation Flood.

Sources said VSNL was concentrating on these three bottlenecks in their service, first, by reconfiguring and upgrading its servers, having more

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telephone lines that people can get Internet access on, and increasing manifold the bandwidth to international Internet servers.

VSNL is expecting an increase of Internet subscribers to rise from the current 70,000 to 87,000 by March and 200,000 by March next year.

While servers have been upgraded and telephone lines increased, bandwidth remains a problem, to be resolved within six months to a year. This could become a crucial issue if and once the Internet subscriber base widens and the use of bandwidth-hogging multimedia services increase.

Demand for services that go beyond text and pictures alone are expected to demand a bandwidth of around 155 megabytes per second. And to this end, VSNL is looking to increase the bandwidth on its services to 644 megabytes per second, a spokesperson said. Currently, VSNL provides just 40 megabytes per second. And that figure was achieved just two months ago.

VSNL plans to add a 2,800 Internet access telephone lines a month, until the customer to dial-up lines ratio increases to 10: 1. Currently, VSNL has less than 4,000 lines connected to the Internet. So the customer-to-line ratio of 17.5:1. And a quarter of these lines are in Bombay.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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