Reliance Infocomm Network Infrastructure

I was just reading about Reliance Infocomm's fibre optic network in India. They claim to have laid fibre not only on long haul links between cities, but also down to most street corners in the metropolies. I know that my corner in Mumbai has been covered by Reliance because they dug up my road for a week around a year ago.

Anyway, the point is, fibre can carry massive amounts of data, more than they could possibly use for any conceivable application today. I don't see why they would not be able to roll out a service capable of 5, 6 maybe even 7 Mbit/s. The bandwidth provided by their infrastructure in the country is virtually unlimited. While the bandwidth on their international gateway might suck, they could, theoretically offer a world-class connection to hosts within India. If they did offer something like this, I'm sure you would see a lot more sites hosted in India.

This is analogous to what happened here in the US during the tech boom of '00. They laid so much friggin fibre in the US that right now, they cant even use 10% of what they have. Bandwidth the cheap as hell, my cable connection for $24/month gives me 5 Mbit.

I beleive the infrastructure to provide worldclass broadband is present in India. God damn, why the hell would they not let us have it.

Source: Broadband Forum