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every aspect of it, from learning to health to entertainment to
commerce to governance.
So far…
The role of information technology in a country’s economic
development and growth cannot be overemphasized. India’s
Planning Commission stated in its ‘Vision 2020’: “The shift from
material to knowledge-based resources opens up vast opportu-
nities for developing countries to accelerate the pace of
development. India’s rate of economic growth can be substan-
tially increased if the country becomes a superpower in
knowledge and if the potential of information and communica-
tion technology are fully understood and exploited.”
Reliance Infocomm was among the service providers that
understood quite early on the pivotal role that information and
communication would play, not only in helping India to grow,
but also in sustaining it. That information can help bridge the
digital divide between urban and rural areas and create an equi-
table Information Society.
There are now 57 million mobile phone users in the country.
In March 2003, there were 13 million. The country then had a
mobile phone density of 1.22, fixed line density of 3.88, and a
total density of 5.10. Today the figure is nearing 10. There were
3.64 million Internet users in the country in March 2003,
compared with six million today.
Service providers have contributed to this growth in large
measure. In less than two years, Reliance Infocomm has gained
10 million subscribers to emerge as India’s largest private sector
telecom service provider, with a total of 12 million subscribers
and a 20 per cent share of the mobile market.
With high tariffs and handset price, a mobile phone was a
luxury barely two years ago. Today it is something that is increas-
ingly making users’ lives easier. Phones are no longer a luxury; in
fact they have become a part of daily life for everyone. The cross
section of users across India, depending on the need and the
capacity to pay, varies from school-going students to top busi-
ness executives, from small vendors to corporate houses, from
agriculture farmers to traders, from housewives to working
women.
Careful planning for the future
Experts acknowledge that the success of service providers has
resulted as much from careful planning as from the rigorous
execution of those plans. Reliance Infocomm founder Dhirubhai
Ambani would say that if you want every Indian to afford mobile
communications, make mobile phone calls cheaper than a post
card. A mobile phone call today costs 40 paise per minute, a
far cry from 1995, when the first cellular call was made in
Calcutta (now Kolkata) at Rs 16.80. While many companies
ramped up in desultory, sporadic stop-and-go bursts, Reliance
Infocomm launched its services nationally only after it had first
established an infrastructure that encompassed 60,000 route
kilometres of terabit-capacity optical fibre cable, providing a
national network that could support unlimited voice, data, and
video traffic.
Given the kind of voice, data, and video content it wanted to
transport over its network in the years to come, Reliance went
for a pan-Indian, high capacity, integrated (wireless and wireline)
and convergent (voice, data and video) digital network, designed
to connect every individual, home and office in India with one
another and the world through a terabit optic fibre digital distri-
bution system. CDMA 2000 1X network technology was fully
data enabled with high-speed data capabilities across the network
and was capable of supporting multimedia applications on
millions of Reliance India Mobile (RIM) handsets. The network
was unified and not fragmented.
Narrowing the digital divide
Be it education, health, entertainment, communications, or
governance, the national infrastructure has been able to make
many people’s lives easier. Useful services and applications
across these areas continue to be introduced. Mobile data and
multimedia services like R World from Reliance Infocomm
contain a growing number of applications in everyday use – for
example, commodity prices, railway reservations and mobile
commerce like bill payments and exam results. High-speed wire-
less Internet services (Reliance’s service is called R Connect),
are giving users Internet access anywhere at anytime, even while
on the move.
1
Reliance Infocomm’s services are accessible to about 50 per
cent (2,800 towns) of the rural and semi-rural towns, and 75,000
villages. The second phase of the digital revolution envisioned by
Reliance begins with the rollout of real broadband, capable of
delivering 100 Mbps to Gigabit bandwidth across the country.
Through innovative use of leading-edge technologies in the fields
of fibre optics, Ethernet, microwave radios, switching, routing,
digital compression and encoding, a new benchmark is being set
for the world to follow. Mass rollout of broadband, offering speeds
of 100 Mbps to millions of people across the vast geography of
India, is a major technological breakthrough.
Reliance Infocomm is proud of its broadband initiative because
the entire nationwide network has been built from scratch to
bring about a digital revolution in India. The network is designed
to deliver affordable and quality education, governance and
healthcare to millions across India; to improve the efficiency of
businesses and generate millions of new jobs; and to put India at
the centre stage of the world. Broadband applications like e-
Education have the potential to revolutionize Indian society. It
can help transcend traditional barriers to development, like a lack
of capital, infrastructure and the challenge of distribution in a
vast country like India.
e-Education:
With real broadband connectivity, educational institutions can
and have been able to source the best study material from
anywhere in the world. Libraries and laboratories across the
country and the world can now be linked to each other for a
seamless exchange of information and learning. One can e-
attend lectures at Oxford from Teynampet in Chennai. Teachers
will be able to share knowledge with their peers from across the
world.
But the reality is that huge disparity marks the country’s educa-
tional landscape. Most educational installations are located in
metros. Despite the government’s best efforts, education has not
been nationalized in reach.
Through the e-learning platform, Reliance Infocomm is using
its vast retail network and massive bandwidth capacity to impart
high quality education as and where it is needed. The company’s
broadband-enabled 241 Reliance WebWorld stores, located in
110 cities, double up as classrooms that can accommodate 10-
15 students at a time. Currently, a Xavier Institute of Management,
Bhubaneswar management course is being offered to students
across these locations, with the aim of using the infrastructure
to pump in more specialized courses in the future.
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