Internet in India

Artist: Shakti
Song: Come On Baby Dance With Me
Comments: Absolute gem from retro Shakti, when they were acoustic, fast and spunky. Impeccable coordination between the guitar and violin. Absolute pleasure.

Soul Renditio n

Ever wondered why the internet sucks in India? While users in China, South Korea, Japan, USA etc have a pay per month model, wonder why you are subjected to the pay per month and byte (of more than alloted traffic)? Wonder why websites like youtube.com exist if one cannot stream in real time? The disambiguation follows.

As the name suggests, the internet is an interconnected - network of Internet Service providers (ISPs). The websites/servers are hosted in IPs (or internet addresses) owned by ISPs. For example, sify.com is most likely hosted by severs routed through the SIFY ISP. Routing basically means providing paths for the flow of internet traffic (bandwidth), much like routing vehicular traffic on, lets say National Highway 4 (NH4) between Bombay and Bangalore. NH4 & the railway line are similar to a couple ISPs connecting two points, lets say BSNL & VSNL, and much like the the two means of transport, the two ISPs may differ in speeds and quality of internet traffic.

Artist: Shakti
Song: Peace Of Mind
Comments: Mellow. Mellifluous. Masterpiece.

Soul Renditio n

A website is like a vehicle, limited by the path it is connected to the external world, much like how a truck cannot use rails to get around. In the website's case, the limitation is which IP it chooses to host its content on. However, a single website can have mirrors on multiple ISPs. When you access a website, you essentially get on the route the particular ISP prefers. So to access google.com, your request may hop from your house to Singapore to Tokyo to LA where the google.com server is physically hosted, the route assuming you are browsing through, say BSNL. The same website may take far fewer/greater hops if you browse through a different ISP.

The way an ISP reduces the number of hops (lesser the hops, greater is the speed) is to form a pact (actual physical connection) with ISPs in other countries. For example, if BSNL had a direct (physical) link with an ISP in the US, your request to view google.com might just take one hop, your home to their server in LA. Hence, an ISP with larger number of pacts would in theory provide faster service, assuming all other underlying infrastructure remains the same.

However, the above mentioned situation is not the most efficient way to hook up the internet and is for the most part antiquated, except in India. Imagine this situation: you are a BSNL subscriber and you try to access sify.com. Your request may have hop from your house to the BSNL server to its parent sever in Singapore to SIFY's parent server in Japan to SIFY's local server in Hyderabad. Basically, to access a sever located in India, your request hopped all over the world, which seems a little retarded. Hence was born the idea of an Internet Exchange: a connection/exchange between ISPs in close proximity. With this concept, your request to view a local website will now be routed to the requested sever through the local exchange and will not travel around the world. Also, it has a normalizing effect on speeds of access of the same location from two different ISPs as your request can now be routed through shorter paths acquired by other ISPs through the exchange.

Artist: Shakti
Song: Girija Sutha Part 1.
Comments: Composed by Mandolin Srinivas. Adrenalin meets Meditation.

Soul Renditio n

The internet can now be visualized as an interconnection of exchanges. So why (still) does the internet suck in India?. Two things: not all Indian ISPs fairly contribute to the National Internet Exchange and most of them route their traffic from other Asian countries, while most of the servers in the world are hosted in the USA (i.e most of the Internet's traffic is to servers in the USA). On unfair contribution to the National exchange, there is no definite solution as some ISPs have more local servers and better pacts with foreign providers than others, which affects the quality of service (which is their marketing pitch). To genuinely better the internet in India, ISPs / National Exchange need to have more pacts with US providers / exchanges as against Asian exchanges. Also, the physical locations of the national exchange is presently in the metros, which is again a retarded decision as most of the traffic in India is from its IT hubs namely Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Some interesting observations:

• India was among the last countries to set up an Exchange (2003)!! Until then, what must have been local traffic still traveled all around the world.
• While China has six Internet Exchanges, India has only one.
• Most Indian ISPs do not have their own gateways (Physical devices used for traffic switching etc).
• Indian ISPs do not have direct physical connections to US exchanges although most of the traffic to and from India is to servers in the US.

Artist: Shakti
Song: Girija Sutha Part deux.
Comments: Composed by Mandolin Srinivas. Adrenalin meets Meditation.

Soul Renditio n