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Rukmini Priyadarshini

A US company says it can help bring broadband Internet access from the road right into your home without hurting your pocket. How cheap does it get?

LARGE-SCALE broadband Internet access in India had a small `walk-on part' a couple of years ago. As of now, it is back in the wings, waiting for the support characters — access costs and improved infrastructure — to get ready. Most of the lead players — Reliance, Tata Tele, Bharti group, Hughes Tele and now BSNL, VSNL, Indian Railways, Power Grid Corporation, GAIL — with thousands, even lakhs of km of optic-fibre cable laid on and more being planned, have been rehashing their lines and trying to work out viable plans.

Issues such as the lack of last-mile infrastructure, underdeveloped content and applications, and limited options in the market mean the growth of broadband has been slow. Further, the current levels of infrastructure do not really encourage broadband applications — — and await the optic-fibre cable networks of the likes of BSNL. Although most of this is planned to cater to the needs of telecom companies, the right technology could transform broadband Internet access for the common man.

Enter Ikanos Communications, a small venture-funded company from Fremont, California, to grab an unexpected role in this big-business-and-deep-pockets production. With its Fx family of chipsets, Ikanos is driving fibre-speeds of up to 100 MBPS over the twisted pair of copper cables that are so much a part of our lives today.

Okay, before we plunge into the rest of the story, here's what we mean by broadband: a bandwidth of 256 Kilo bytes or more per second. If you want that in context, the telephone line you use to dial up to link to the Internet, theoretically offers you 33.2 Kbps.

This company is in talks with telecom companies in India to enable them to provide optic fibre-based services to consumers across the country. These telecom companies have installed the infrastructure that will let them take the fibre lines right up to the road near the home, but find the last mile, or in many cases the last few feet, a very expensive proposition.

Says Richard Sekar, Vice-President, Marketing, Ikanos, the last leg of connectivity could cost as much as $10,000 per building or home. And having invested millions of dollars in laying the infrastructure, service providers are naturally reluctant to shell out more. "Use the existing copper lines, instead," says Sekar. That and the Ikanos family of chipsets that lets service providers deliver fibre and fibre-based services such as HDTV, from the roadside to every home, apartment block or commercial building.

Fibre-quality service over copper lines? That should raise eyebrows. Sekar says the Ikanos Fx is a programmable chipset that lets carriers and service providers offer voice, data and TV over existing telephone lines. This is done through an always-on broadband connection at a capital expenditure 100 to 1,000 times lower than the current costs of taking fibre into the customer's premises. Ikanos can cut the cost of providing service to as low as $300 per subscriber, from more than $14,000 for pure fibre alternatives, he says.

In Japan and South Korea, where the company has customers such as NEC, Sumitomo Electric, Dasan, Millinet, Woojung Systec, Samsung and Marconi in Europe, the copper-fibre combination has proved successful, according to Sekar. Speeds have improved and connectivity costs have fallen. This semiconductor company outsources its manufacturing to Taiwan and Austria.

A variety of applications too are possible for Ikanos' new product: online gaming, high-speed Internet access, video services including HDTV, high-speed virtual private networks for remote connectivity and telecommuting, voice services and video conferencing. The technology allows telephone companies to configure speeds on a per-customer basis. Sekar is confident of an encore in India.

Picture by Vino John

priya@thehindu.co.in

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