[governance] FW: [1st-mile-nm] FCC Lifeline Program

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

You do have a local government owned telco stil providing internet access, along with landline and cellphone service (BSNL) but people hardly ever use them these days because of cheaper and faster service available from private players, not to mention BSNL’s proverbially lackadaisical and bureaucratic customer service.

For example a 8 Mbos plan (3rd column in this list) from bsnl costs inr 1275 ($19.25 a month)
http://www.bsnl.in/opencms/bsnl/BSNL/services/broadband/BB_plans_high_speed.html

And on at least one private player - http://www.acttv.in/index.php/products/act-broadband (select “tariff” and choose say chennai or bangalore) - rates start at INR 999 for 40 Mbps ($15 a month).

Panchayats (village councils) - to say nothing of city municipalities - are already overworked in providing other infrastructure - roads, water, public health and such.  Even if there were budget there’s very little on the ground expertise in running an internet service provider so this would end up farmed out to a third party - with the typical governmen ttendering process.

I am sure IT 4 Change is doing a great job in one - or possibly more small towns - but a high touch approach of that sort with an NGO practically adopting a village - is just not going to scale, especially given the population of India, and its fairly unique connectivity patterns (mostly on mobile devices, these days, and with data + voice plans among the cheapest in the world (I pay $35 a month for 7 GB of LTE data + voice and text), plus an extremely large number of cheap smartphones imported from chinese and korean manufacturers or OEM’d there by local phone vendors.


> On 02-Apr-2016, at 3:17 PM, Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In India I've never understood why the Panchyats overall have not been used
> to develop local infrastructure, demand and capacity for Internet use
> (although I belief there are some recent developments in that direction
> coming from various states).  


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