Very many individuals with myopic vision questioned the relevance of space activities in a newly independent nation which was finding it difficult to feed its population. But the vision of the leaders was very clear : if Indians were to play a meaningful role in the community of nations, they must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to their real-life problems.
– A P J Abdul Kalam in his autobiography, Wings of Fire
Introduction
India is a country at the cusp of a major transformation. Since early 2000, the Indian internet user base has virtually exploded. It took 20 years to have the first 100 million users online, but the next 100 million users will come in less than three years. To cater to this meteoric rise in demand, it is imperative to look beyond the traditional modes of internet delivery, and as this chapter argues, space-based solutions are necessary.
India: A Country on a Launchpad
Through a series of economic reforms that began in the early 1990s, India was made open for international players in a move that resulted in a rapid and sustained expansion of the economy. Between 1991 and 2015, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country rose from a modest $200 billion to $2 trillion.2 This impressive growth was chiefly driven by the flourishing
Information Technology (IT) and Information Technology enabled Services (ITeS), as well as a growing industrial sector. Currently, India’s export of software and allied services account for about two-thirds of the $120-130-billion global market. Today, India is also home to research and development centres of many of the major technology companies.
Buoyed by the success of IT and ITeS, Indians are moving out of their comfort zones and embracing entrepreneurship. As of January 2016, India had more than 19,000 technology-enabled start-ups, of which about
5,000 were started in 2015 alone. E-commerce companies have greatly increased the choice of products for the consumers and allowed sellers to reach out to a large number of customers. By bringing in the rural markets to the mainstream, the e-commerce ecosystem has the potential to integrate rural and urban economies. A large number of start-ups working on the Internet of Things (IoT) are trying to hook up sensors and generate a data deluge. Cashing in on the rising awareness about the electronic payments are financial technology companies building digital wallets that enable the seamless flow of money among various stakeholders.
Government’s ‘Digital India’ programme envisions to “transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy”. The government intends to achieve this by focusing on three vision areas, namely:
1) Digital Infrastructure as a Core Utility to Every Citizen; 2) Governance and Services on Demand; and 3) Digital Empowerment of Citizens.
In a nutshell, both the government and the private sectors are working together to take India to the next level. However, for India to take off from the launchpad, internet connectivity is the fuel—connectivity not just in cities but reaching the end points of the country.
India in Space
India has been an active player in space and has always utilised space for improving the quality of life of its people. It is one of the few countries in the world that have the capability to develop indigenous technologies to carry out space missions.6 In 2014 the country joined an elite club by successfully launching a Mars Orbiter in its very first attempt and at a relatively lower cost. After its establishment in 1969, the Indian Space
Research Organisation (ISRO) has developed significant expertise in building satellites for various applications including remote sensing, communication, weather forecasting, and national security. India’s indigenous launch vehicles, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and the Geo-Synchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV) have earned a name for their reliability in the global launch services market. As of September 2016, PSLV had successfully placed 121 satellites into low earth orbit, of which, 79 are from countries other than India. Every year, updates provided by ‘eyes in the space’ have helped save thousands of lives in times of extreme weather events like a cyclone. Remote sensing data provided by ISRO satellites are helping researchers across the country to understand the impact of climate change on the local environment. There also have been efforts to leverage satellite communication technologies for making quality education and healthcare available to people living in the remotest villages.
However, satellites can play a much bigger role in India’s ambition to transform itself into a country empowered by digital technologies. Sustained efforts of global space organisations to build capability in space has created the required talent and companies across the globe, including in India, that are capable of taking private space to its version
2.0. ISRO is encouraging private industry to transform themselves from manufacturer of parts to becoming full satellite integrators and manufacturers. There is enough expertise in India and globally to create multiples of these organisations and serve the needs of the growing satellite industry. In light of this development, several companies including start- ups have ambitious plans to build viable and sustainable businesses solving real problems.
Taking the Internet to the Villages
India faces various hurdles as it aims to transform itself into a technologically developed nation. With an estimated 462 million internet users online, India has the second largest internet user base after China. But, with more than 65 percent of the population without access to internet connectivity, India’s task is difficult.10 Internet penetration in the US, for example, is at 88.5 percent; Japan is at 91.1 percent, and China, 52.2 percent. However, what stands out for India is the rate of growth. Between 2015 and 2016, the number of internet users in India increased by 30.5 percent—a growth that is unheard of in any other country in the world in the same period. The high growth rate can largely be attributed to the fact that more than half of India’s population is below 25 years of age. Further, the growth is not limited to the number of users; the demand for data, especially over mobile phones, is also growing at a much faster rate all over the world. By 2020, monthly global mobile data traffic is expected to reach 30.6 exabytes from 3.7 exabytes in 2015.11
The internet user growth so far has been skewed towards urban areas even though majority of the population resides in rural areas. The main reason for this disparity is low population density in rural areas which makes it difficult for traditional internet solutions to recover the cost. However, there has been a growing demand for internet in urban and rural areas alike. By 2018, India is expected to have more than 500 million internet users, and about half of them will come from rural areas.12
Recognising the socio-economic dividends of broadband internet, in 2011, the Indian government rolled out an ambitious project to connect 250,000 village panchayats with optical fibres. The project, initially called National Optical Fiber Network, and later renamed Bharat-Net 2015, is expected to facilitate transition to e-commerce, e-Banking, e-Governance, e-Education, and Tele-medicine. At the time of writing this chapter, the project had reached 15,624 village panchayats.
All the major internet service providers in India are also making large investments into expanding their existing infrastructure to get ready for the expected growth. Bharti Airtel, for instance, is committed to expanding its mobile broadband coverage to all Indian towns and 750,000 villages.
Reliance Jio, a relatively new player into the country’s telecom market, has made large investments to create fibre optic-based 4G infrastructure to provide telecom internet service across India. However, their coverage capacity is strongly linked to the population density of a region.
Limitations of Optical Fibres
Optical fibre, along with wireless infrastructure mounted on towers, form the core of ground infrastructure required to provide broadband connectivity. In fact, there are long cables on the ocean bed connecting continents and transmitting large volumes of data at very high speeds. Similar fibres, laid underground, are also used to deliver broadband internet to homes and businesses in cities and towns. Optical fibres, though reliable, turn out to be expensive when they are used to connect regions of low population densities. It costs about $3,000 to lay optical fibre for a length of one kilometer. Thus, if there are not enough consumers, recovering capital costs becomes a challenge. Since a significant portion of the Indian population that is yet to come online lives in semi-urban and rural areas, it may not be economical to lay optical fibres in some of those regions. Also, developing ground infrastructure is an incremental process—it is not possible to provide connectivity to a village unless its surrounding areas are already connected. Therefore, providing high-bandwidth internet to such a large, widely distributed population creates a need to look beyond the ground infrastructure. Space technology may yet have all the answers.
Beaming Internet from Space
Satellite internet provides an economical solution to most of the challenges faced by ground infrastructure. Optical fibres bring in higher capacity in a concentrated fashion, while space-based technologies are effective at distributing capacity over a large area. Calculations show that the cost to cover one sq km from space varies between $1.5 and $6, which is negligible as compared to $3,000 to $30,000 required by ground infrastructure to cover the same area. Moreover, accessing space-based internet is as simple as getting DTH television services—all a consumer needs is an antenna on the rooftop, and a set top box inside the house.
Satellite infrastructure also complements the ground internet network. Areas where ground infrastructure is difficult and cost-intensive to penetrate,
satellite infrastructure can easily cover. Moreover, it also frees ground infrastructure from the burden of being incremental as telecom towers with satellite as backbone can now be deployed in new areas without worrying about surrounding infrastructure. Owing to the minimal surrounding infrastructure required when telecom towers uses satellite as backbone, it expedites the return on investment for ground infrastructure.
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