The Indian government, seeking to allow rapid expansion of Internet access across the subcontinent, announced today that it's junking a monopoly agreement with a company running a slow, extremely expensive national network in favor of an unlimited number of new ISPs.
The result, executives in the industry said, should be a Net population explosion from the current 80,000 users in the nation of nearly 1 billion.
"We will finally see the Internet become a national phenomenon, and spread beyond India's big cities. There could be 1.5 million users in three years," said Dewang Mehta, executive director of the National Association of Software and Service Companies.
The current monopoly holder, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd., has strangled access with a combination of restrictively high charges and slow service. For a Delhi-to-Bombay 64-Kbps link for one year, the firm charges about 1 million rupees (US$27,473) a year. It also hits customers with an 83-cent-a-minute access charge and requires subscribers to buy 500-hour blocks of network time.
Reuters contributed to this report.
