Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Massive WiMax Network for India

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sat Jan 26, 2008 11:27 AM
from the well-bully-for-them-then dept.
Wireless Networking Hardware
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget reports that the largest Indian telecom company is planning to build a mobile WiMax network covering three states on the subcontinent capable of serving 250 million people. State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited is leaning on Soma Networks to build the broadband-speed network in response to government requirement that 20 million broadband lines be in service by 2010." Meanwhile I can't even get cable. Maybe it's time to move to India.
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: Massive WiMax network for India by Anonymous Coward
[+] Australian WiMax Pioneer Calls It a Disaster 202 comments
Anonymous Coward writes "Garth Freeman, CEO of Australia's first WiMax operator, sat down at the recent International WiMax Conference in Bangkok and unleashed a tirade about the failings of the technology, leaving an otherwise pro-WiMax audience stunned. His company, Buzz Broadband, had deployed a WiMax network over a year ago, and Freeman left no doubt about what conclusions he had drawn. He claimed that 'its non-line of sight performance was "non-existent" beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.' We've previously discussed the beginnings of WiMax as well as recent plans for a massive network in India.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Massive WiMax Network for India 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Tongue in cheek to the submitter (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dunbal (464142) on Saturday January 26 2008, @11:34AM (#22193872)
    Maybe it's time to move to India.

          Why not. Your job already has.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Alsn (911813)
      The first though that popped into my mind was instead the following:

      Maybe it's time to start a web based company such as a store or a downloading service in india... ;)

    • Maybe it's time to move to India.

      Why not. Your job already has.

      I was thinking Brazil [american.edu] myself. Nice weather and good place to retire. Probably more stable and less people per square km. Less strife and unrest.

      And with how many people there are in India, WiMax will be maxed out to a point it isn't very reliable or usable, much like many support centers I have had to recently use.

      • Where did she go? To remote no-road villages??? If she had been to cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Poona, Bombay, Madras, Jaipur, Nagpur, Calcutta, and even smaller towns like Solapur, Erode, Cochin, etc., she can buy toilet papers of 4 different brands in packets of one or four.
        She should visit a shop for that. They don't deliver toilet paper home.
        How i say this?
        By experience: I had to travel between half the cities mentioned above, and i could buy it.

      • Re:Wimax or infrastructure (Score:4, Insightful)

        by superash (1045796) on Saturday January 26 2008, @01:23PM (#22194668)
        This is exactly the kind of bullshit that I cannot take. Your sister comes to India and expects everything here to be like USA(going by your contact info at your homepage)? Would you have taken the same kind of comment from me if I was in the US and was asking for something that we Indians did over here? You would've have said -" If you want that then stay the fuck in your country". So, you get my point.
          • If your general prowess with humor is a good representation of most Indians then I shudder at the thought of the memes that would arise from slashdot.IN
            • All your Madirs are belong to us? :-D
              • Awww hell, messed that up, try again. ...
                all your madir are belong to us ...
                Stupid rules of grammar flirting through my neurons, making me to things its way...

              • Therefore, slashdot.in could constructively complement the main site.It could provide a wider,more informed coverage of stories of interest to the growing community of indian technology professionals,sans the regular snide comments on outsourcing.

                Well, go ahead and segregate yourselves. Maybe that works in India. That's not the american way. We are loud, ugly and mean. But we say what we are thinking in public - putting all our cards on the table, free-speech and the whole bit, and that ultimately leads to working things out. That's the way the melting pot works.

                Going off to an indian-only slashdot enclave can let you pretend that people aren't bigots, but it does nothing to improve the situation. You'll have your own groups of troublemakers t

            • What's your point ?
              My point is that even if toilet paper isn't commonly provided in normal bathrooms in India, you can just buy some at a store that caters to ex-pats. Just like Indians in the USA can buy stuff that's not commonly available too.

              You don't have to get the fuck out of the country and framing the discussion in those terms is the real flamebait, not my pointing it out.
      • When in Rome ... etc etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_cleansing#Water [wikipedia.org] FYI, I am Indian.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by jalfreize (173125)
        Recently, I came to the US as a grad student, and was shocked that the US has no running water in their toilets.
        They actually use pieces of paper!!!
        Thats soo lame, not to mention yucky!!! ughhh...
      • Indians actually like being clean so they use water instead of paper which just smears it around without really cleaning. Still if you like paper you can get it in most supermarkets . It will probably be expensive as it does not sell much and there are no economies of scale

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Dunbal (464142)
        It was a joke, silly, not a lament. I think India has come a LONG way in the past 20 years and I really hope that it fulfills its destiny as a major economic force in the world in the near future. I personally am anti-US or perhaps more specifically anti-Bush, and snigger every time the US has another finger slip from its tenuous position as the "world leader". But, yet again we have demonstrated that it's very difficult to effectively transmit sarcasm over the internet.

        • I personally am anti-US

          Be sure to declare this, should you find yourself trying to get into our country. Thanks...

          • Be sure to declare this, should you find yourself trying to get into our country. Thanks...

            Yes, because "freedom of speech" means something different in your country. No Mr. Paranoid, I won't declare it because I enjoy free travel across borders (it's one of the human rights you know) and don't want to be locked up on "terror" charges for speaking my mind. But don't worry, I won't be strapping any explosives to myself. You guys are doing a great job of destroying your own country as it

            • Re:Tongue in cheek to the submitter (Score:4, Insightful)

              by mi (197448) <mi+slashdot@aldan.algebra.com> on Saturday January 26 2008, @06:55PM (#22196752) Homepage

              Yes, because "freedom of speech" means something different in your country.

              Nope, "freedom of speech" means exactly the same here as it always has. You are free to proclaim your hatred, we are free to deny you entry.

              I enjoy free travel across borders (it's one of the human rights you know)

              No, it is not, unfortunately.

              don't want to be locked up on "terror" charges for speaking my mind.

              Has not happened to anyone yet — don't overestimate your importance. Even burning the flag (incredibly offensive and banned in many other countries) is still legal here...

              Meanwhile I'll just keep taking your money on Wall Street.

              You mean, you'll continue to participate in our markets? Great — we welcome all kind...

        • Re:Tongue in cheek to the submitter (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Tablizer (95088) on Saturday January 26 2008, @02:37PM (#22195186) Homepage Journal
          I think India has come a LONG way in the past 20 years and I really hope that it fulfills its destiny as a major economic force in the world in the near future.

          Me too. We need more strong democracies.

          I personally am anti-US or perhaps more specifically anti-Bush

          Keep in mind that half the US population can't stand Bush either. He has tricked the other half using simplistic logic and religious games. I'm sure India will have its share of nightmare politicians. Democracy sometimes burps loudly.

          and snigger every time the US has another finger slip from its tenuous position as the "world leader".

          Just be careful what you wish for. The US's foreign policy is dominated more by incompetence than an attempt at "taking over the world". However, a different super-power may want more of the second.

          But a strong India as a counter-weight to the US would be a nice thing. Who knows, if wages go up in India, then perhaps you will start outsourcing to us. Or, at least stuff will be more balanced out. It will be an interesting fusion of cultures.
                   
      • Who would want a program written by low end coders? It would be like having a couch made out of shoddy materials, except that you could never get rid of it. If you are using a badly designed program and start using it for your day-to-day needs then that application contains all your data, and is often essential to how you do business. It's like like a couch where you can just throw it away, get a new one, and continue on as if the other one existed. Thinking you can do software with "Hello World" program
        • Lots of internal business apps are written this way. Either by internal teams or consultants. The good programmers work for mainstream software vendors, and the rest (e.g. the lower 80% of the graduating CS majors, and everyone else who took a programming course in college) take these gigs.

          Frankly, it comes down to not being able to get the good programmers to do it. They're either superpriced consultants or utterly unavailable as employees of software vendors that aren't going to write the code you want
      • Do you WANT to do low end coding or do you want to work on the actualy design of your software/hardware system. The part that has been outsourced to india is this low quality back end donkey work that can essentially be done by any one who can type a hello world program if the code is shown to them

        I don't think it is necessarily "low end", often its just the side of things that are less customer-facing. It may be some intricate algorithm that is already fairly-well described in the requirements, but requi

      • Re:Tongue in cheek to the submitter (Score:5, Interesting)

        by stonewolf (234392) on Saturday January 26 2008, @02:27PM (#22195120) Homepage
        Well, I was one of those people doing high level design working in the R&D department of my company. I did a lot of research and design and a fair about of coding for the products we were developing.

        One day I came in and found out that all the US employees of the company were being laid off. The owners of the company had found a software company in India that they could just buy for nothing and moved *all* the work, including R&D, to India. I guess that is at least one data point against the idea that only the grunt work has moved to India.

        The first year I was unemployed I was able get a few interviews and some contract working running doing testing and one gig helping a company figure out how incompetent the US development staff was. (There are a lot of people all over the world who can write a program but are not qualified to design so much as a turd.)

        The second year there were fewer contract jobs and interviews.

        The third year I retrained as a teacher. After the third year the *only* company that has shown any interest in hiring me was an Indian company that was desperate enough for experienced people to offer to pay my relocation to India. After my kids are out of college my wife and I are seriously considering moving to India or China. I know a couple of people in my situation who are now living like kings pulling down what would be considered good US salaries, being paid in Euros, living in India and China.

        Now I make a good wage (for an Indian) teaching people in the US what "click and drag" means. Believe it or not, but a *huge* portion of the people graduating from high school in the US have never used a PC and are scared shitless of having to use one. An even bigger portion of people over thirty do not know what "click and drag" means.

        So, lets cut the crap about the quality of the jobs going to India. The only reason Indians aren't getting those jobs is that so many of them do not have the experience to do them. In India those jobs are being filled by Americans and Europeans with decades of experience. Not to mention the huge number of Indians and Chinese who went to school in the US and have worked here for decades who are now going back to start, run, or do high level work, in India and China.

        Stonewolf
      • When I develop software modules, the stages are generally:

          (Research, Design, Implement, Test )*, Integrate (with main system)

        During the implement and test stages, many new ideas are formed which get passed back to the research and design stages for the next generation. How can the two be split? All you are succeeding in doing is giving away the designs and improvements for your next generation products.
        • Meanwhile companies back here in the US cry and sob that there are no ready-made senior-level employees for them to hire for rates far below the level that the self-created scarcity of such labor should command, since they shipped all the entry level positions overseas and can no longer find and promote their own talent from within.

          It's called "lobbying". The lobbyists paint a picture of poorly-educated Americans so that Congress etc. will let them offshore and get more visa workers who work more hours fo
      • That's false.

        And has been shown to be so many times over here.

        1. The latest example of a foreigner working in India is Mr. Gary Kirsten (http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/southafrica/content/player/45813.html), the Indian cricket coach. The two coaches before him were Australian and New Zealander respectively.

        2. Australian cricketers routinely accept advertising contracts (and in one case a movie role) in India.

        3. There are backpackers from Europe working in call-centers.

        Your statement is not grounded

  • Like mobile phones (Score:5, Insightful)

    by apathy maybe (922212) on Saturday January 26 2008, @11:35AM (#22193880) Homepage Journal
    There is a good reason for under-developed countries like India not to invest in cabling. It is the same reason why such countries have so many mobile phones as compared to landlines.

    Mobile phone towers are a lot cheaper to put up then running cables everywhere, they are a lot easier to upgrade, etc. (One reason why Japan and (West) Germany were able to do so well economically after WW2 was all the new equipment, all the old stuff having been bombed. Yes the money helped, but France got that money too...)

    Anyway, good oh.

    • Re:Like mobile phones (Score:5, Insightful)

      by freedom_india (780002) on Saturday January 26 2008, @12:38PM (#22194354) Homepage Journal
      Unfortunately mobile towers have the least redundancy in disaster times.
      All mobile towers have a 99% utilisation in india.
      It means if all the mobile users dial at the same time, you get a network busy tone. Heck i get a network busy tone about 30% of the time.
      During a storm the mobile network is the first to fail.

      Meanwhile the landline is the strongest network india has.
      If the power goes off, the generators in the exchanges run it for 24 hours, and even if they fail, the batteries keep them for another 14 hours.
      The generators are topped off with fuel almost weekly.

      The mobile towers run on batteries for 7 hours max. After that they start dropping off one by one.
      • Also, there is only so much bandwidth available in the electromagnetic spectrum. Once you fill the spectrum, it's very hard to find more capacity. With cabling, you can always add a little bit more, or use fibre optics to carry more data over the same size cable. Sure there's still limits, but cabled communications can provide much more bandwidth than wireless ever will. Wireless is the cheap way out that works now, but doesn't account for future growth. It's already becoming a problem with too many wi
        • Spectrum utilization is very, very important especially for large deployments. 250M => crazzy slow speed.

          Anyway, wireless is least reliable, least secure method of deployment. It is also cheapest to deploy in the near term. In the long term, fiber is cheaper and by far more reliable and expandable.

          WiMax may be a good secondary, low bandwidth connection to fiber/DSL. It is not a reliable primary connection though.
    • Your comment seems to imply that cabling is better than wireless.While this is certainly true for optic fibres,wireless will beat conventional copper twisted pair cabling hands down in many cases.The cost/capacity ratio is simply too skewed in favour of wireless,in India.And this has nothing to do with India being "under-developed".This is simple engineering. Anyway,India has a significant investment in Optic Fiber channels.There are companies both in public and private sectors,that specialize in making op
    • This is more like Wireless in Local Loop [wikipedia.org].

  • Meanwhile... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dcollins (135727) on Saturday January 26 2008, @11:53AM (#22194016) Homepage
    "Meanwhile I can't even get cable. Maybe it's time to move to India."

    Dude, the free market solves all problems. Didn't you get the memo?

    • Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 26 2008, @12:22PM (#22194216)
      XOHM (www.xohm.com) is coming *very* soon and will offer WiMAX across the US. Our WiMAX buildout will be complete long before India's is. Many parts of the network are already operational and many active (non-commercial) users are on the network today. Performance is also VERY good, better than advertised.
      • XOHM will make your city one big hot spot (COVERAGE NOT AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE).

              So I can get access everywhere except where I can't. Yawn. Call me when you have more than a couple silly videos to offer.

        • So I can get access everywhere except where I can't. Yawn. Call me when you have more than a couple silly videos to offer.
          What, you think the Indian service will offer connectivity across 100% of the nation? Are you on crack?
    • The largest private company in India (Reliance) has soft-launched [convergence.in] WiMax for consumers in some parts of Bangalore... and a quick search on Google reveals users are not very happy [wordpress.com]. SIFY, Aircel and VSNL already offer WiMax for corporate customers in some parts of the country..
      More here [wimax.com]
        • I haven't read any WIMAX reviews, but usually all I hear about broadband providers, even in the US, are complaints.
          • Well, I have Time Warner cable internet, I live in Southern California, and I have no complaints. It's screaming fast and it's never lost service (that I've noticed). So you can count me as a satisfied broadband customer.
    • "Meanwhile, nobody will subsidize the cable service that I want so the costs are mostly hidden from me and borne by others who wouldn't otherwise pay for it."

      There, fixed that so it will make more sense to you.

    • "Meanwhile I can't even get cable. Maybe it's time to move to India."

      Dude, the free market solves all problems. Didn't you get the memo?

      What free market? There isn't one.

      Falcon
  • Tamilnadu, Karnataka and Andhrapradesh? That would make sense. Infact Chennai-Bangalore-Hyderabad triangle alone would be worth it.

    But given the hype and meddling by politicians, they might be pouring money in Godforsaken places like the Bihar-Madhya Pradesh-Rajasthan corridor.

    • Re:Which three states? (Score:4, Informative)

      by oook_in (703298) on Saturday January 26 2008, @12:47PM (#22194420) Homepage
      Looks like it's Maharashtra, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. This article [thehindubusinessline.com] also mentions that the roll out is supposed to happen by 2010. The weird thing is that the city of Mumbai in Maharashtra is serviced by another telecom company MTNL and not BSNL. I wonder if it will be covered by this WiMax network.

  • 3G might be winning out rather than WiMax in India (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ScorpFromHell (837952) on Saturday January 26 2008, @12:39PM (#22194358) Homepage

    Computer penetration is not as good as mobiles in India. Also a 3g mobile is far cheaper (~ $200) than a computer (~ $300).

    The common man is more comfortable with using a mobile than a computer.

    If enough mobile apps are made available for most of the stuff that the common man requires it might be possible that 3g phones win over the wimax connected phones.

    In addition to the apps like feed readers, gmail, google maps, browsers, there need to be applications that can enable the common man to bank, pay bills, shop, get weather updates (atleast warnings), get various examination results (believe it or not, this is a big business for small time entrepreneurs in the rural districts), make bookings in trains, buses, etc.

  • India had wireless long ago ! (Score:4, Funny)

    by kicks-ass (977232) on Saturday January 26 2008, @01:13PM (#22194606)
    The Russians dug 1000 ft in the ground and found copper wire, They declared Russians had electricity 1000 years back US dug and found Optical fibre, and said US had telepphone 2000 years back Indians dug, found nothing, Then said we had wireless communication technology 5000 years back
    • May be you are not aware of the realities out here. If it were only upto the free market, they would never go to the rural India, where India resides but not the money. There is no restriction on the free market to not implement WiMax but they aren't going to the rural areas even though they have started providing it in Bangalore & other urban areas.
      • That's stupid. Just because they haven't built it yet doesn't mean they would never build it. You should always start with the area with the highest return first.

      • Some things (like Internet) are more important than clean water.

        There is no Internet either. Even the stated goal:

        response to government requirement that 20 million broadband lines be in service by 2010." Meanwhile I can't even get cable. Maybe it's time to move to India.

        means far lower broadband penetration, than in the US (itself hardly a champion in this area). India has well over a billion people — more than three times America's population. Yet even its goal for 2 years from now is much lower

    • Yeah, but get ready for a *massive* culture shock. When you arrive there, it's like you landed on a different planet or went back in time 100 years in the urban cities and 200-300 years in the villages.

      So... as they say here on slashdot: Goodluckwiththat!

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.