India Broadband

India Broadband Internet

While their own domestic retail broadband plans are taking time getting off the ground, VSNL and Reliance Communications are both eyeing a slice of Singapore Government's "Infocomm Masterplan" for the year 2015 that provides for what it says will be the most modern retail broadband network in the world.

Both the companies are being issued requests for proposals (RFPs) consequent to the request for concept (RFC) submissions made by them to the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore for the project, according to the IDA Web site.

The size of the project has not yet been specified, but it is bound to be very large and attractive for the companies, said a senior official with one of them.

Every company that had submitted an RFC for the project is being issued an RFP, he added.

VSNL and Reliance Communications will be competing with several international companies who are being issued RFPs, some of them being Cisco Systems (US), Datacraft (Singapore), Hutchison Global Communications and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd (Singapore), Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Siemens Communications and Singapore Telecommunications.

The response to the RFC is a non-binding expression of interest in participating in the subsequent RFP process, according to the IDA Web site.

In March, IDA had announced a 10-year Infocomm Masterplan, which it refers to as iN2015 (Intelligent Nation).

Under this plan every home in Singapore will be connected by a network with initial provisioning of 100 mbps, which will eventually be raised to one gbps.

There will also be a pervasive wireless broadband network supplementing this fibre network.

Through the RFCs, IDA had sought proposals from interested parties on the design, financing, construction and operation of the next generation national broadband network (NGN) for the project.

Details were sought on network capability, interconnection, market coverage, timing, rollout strategy, construction and installation techniques.

"The IDA wants to license one operator, which will be an infrastructure company that will create a vehicle which can be given to any ISP or retail service provider in that country who wants to offer services on that broadband network," said an official with one of the Indian companies in the running for the project.

Both VSNL and Reliance Communications are struggling to overcome last-mile problems on the domestic retail broadband front, despite their substantially large fibre networks in the country.

This is because the last mile is not unbundled in the country (meaning incumbent operators BSNL and MTNL are not willing to share their last-mile network).

Creation of a wired last mile is prohibitively expensive in the retail context, and all Indian broadband operators are struggling to find a solution to reach their end-customers at their homes.