India “Well Behind” In Internet Infrastructure, Warns Google Boss
Please note that we are not authorised to provide any investment advice. The content on this page is for information purposes only.
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Thursday urged the Indian government to invest more in fast-speed Internet connectivity across the country, highlighting that just 20 million users had access to high-speed broadband – out of an estimated 130 million Internet subscribers in a population of 1.2 billion people.
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Thursday urged the Indian government to invest more in fast-speed Internet connectivity across the country, highlighting that just 20 million users had access to high-speed broadband – out of an estimated 130 million Internet subscribers in a population of 1.2 billion people.
Speaking during a Google-organised conference in New Delhi, as cited by AFP, Schmidt noted that India “is well behind in the web services model that the rest of the world is adopting,” and suggested that the government may have grown complacent due to the country’s earlier success in the high-tech sector.
[quote]”The Internet feels here like in America in 1994…My guess would be that having been satisfied with the great success of IT (during the late 20th-early 21st century), the Indian government and the leadership has made the same mistake that companies do, they rested on their own laurels,” he said.[/quote]Related: Contribution of India’s IT Industry to Economic Progress
Related: The Broken BRIC – Why India’s Economy Is Underperforming: Raghuram Rajan
Related: The Broken BRIC: India’s Economic Challenges
Nonetheless, Schmidt still believed that India had the potential to outgrow China in the Internet revolution.
“There are roughly 600 million mobile phone users in India, there are about 130 million Internet users, but there are only about 20 million broadband users. So by any definition India is under-penetrated. And in our book… we talk a lot about the importance of the next 5 billion (Internet users).
“Many of those five billion would be coming from India. So imagine a situation five to 10 years from now. When there is a billion people on the Internet. Will they be significantly different from the first 100 million users? I’m sure there will be many more languages and they won’t be so English focused.
[quote]”This place (India) is going to be rocking… In the short term it is China, but math favours India. And I’m a mathematician,” he said, according to the Press Times of India.[/quote]What Schmidt proposes is for the government to rollout more fibre-optic cables across the country. Schmidt however acknowledges that while the proposal is simple enough, regulatory and debt challenges continue to plague the telecoms industry – in a country that still finds trouble providing basic services such as power or sewage to hundreds of millions of citizens.
Related: India To Spend $18 Billion On Preventing Another Massive Blackout
Related: Facebook, Google Among Websites Charged In India For “Offensive & Objectionable” Content
Related: Resolving India’s Entrepreneurial Paradox: Key To Starting Up The Economy?
“Let me tell you this simple formula, take fibre optic cables and run it everywhere in the ground that you can possibly imagine… Those fibreoptic cables will last 20, 30, 40 years and scale to infinite bandwidth…and will solve any connectivity problem.”
[quote]The issue is that the telecom industry here is under-capitalised and has a lot of debt, and if they try to do something on that front then they need lot of help to do it, Schmidt said. [/quote]
According to World Bank data, just 10.5 percent of India’s population had access to the web in 2011. By comparison, richer China has an Internet penetration rate of around 39 percent, while fellow BRIC nations Brazil and Russia had penetration rates of around 45 percent and 50 percent respectively.
