India to Launch Major Cable TV-Based Broadband Initiative?

Of India's 100 million Internet users, about 12.5 million have broadband. India's government seems to want to change that, and seems to want to rely on cable TV networks that already reach about 90 million Indian households, Businessweek reports.

A new telecom policy that would ease foreign investment rules for cable TV providers of broadband access seeks to boost the number of broadband connections to 175 million, by 2017, reaching 600 million by 2020.

The new policy might not have immediate implications for rural broadband, though. Right now there are about 260,000 broadband connections in rural India, though 800 million people live in those rural areas, including at least 600,000 villages. 

One has to assume wireless is key to any future progress, as the cost of  building a kilometer of fixed network plant costs about $60,000 to $70,000. Those costs have tended in the past to encourage experiments with kiosks  and other methods of getting connectivity to a village. 

Separately, the Indian government is building a $4.5 billion National Optic Fiber Network (NOFN), to take broadband connectivity to the villages by 2014. But some earlier efforts have failed. 

Called Bharat Broadband, the project will connect 250,000 self-governing bodies at the village level across the country. 

Though Indian rural Internet access might be as low as two percent of households at the moment, we should expect to see enormous changes over the next 10 years.

The number of users is expected to climb from 120 million to 350 million by 2015, for example,  according to McKinsey, largely in urban areas, as you would expect. 

According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India and Indian Market Research Bureau there are 38 million people in rural India who have used the Internet at least once in their life, and this number is expected to reach 45 million by December 2012.

That would boost rural India Internet penetration  has grown from 2.6 percent in 2010 to 4.6 percent in 2012. 

At least 90 percent of Indian villages have inadequate communications facilities, according ot the World Bank. "With few exceptions, their telecommunications connection to the outside world amounts to one public telephone," the World Bank has said.