India and the Internet
By: Niraj Wagh
Tags: Facts, India, Internet, Data

Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

Imagine that last bit of data your app/browser just sent to the Medium servers.

You requested this article and a request was made from your app/browser to the medium servers. This request contained a lot of bits of data, but for now, just consider only one bit of data.

This bit started its journey from your app/browser, then it reached the antenna/ethernet port of your device from where it enters the internet and then passed through those large oceans in the form of light all the way up to the medium servers.

Yes, it’s correct, “Light”. Your bit of data was converted into a light signal before transferred from one end of the ocean to the other end (Provided Medium servers are located across the ocean).

When your request was received by the medium server, it responded back with data in the form of this article.

But the best part of your request was, all this happened in just a few milliseconds. What I want to say is, you just sent some data all through those large deep oceans in under a second. Isn’t this fascinating?

This was a very high-level overview of the request made by you for accessing this article. There are a lot more technicalities.

As of July 2020, the estimated world population is 7.8 billion and the total number of internet users in the world are 4.8 billion(62% of the world population). India has a population of 1.38 billion and the total number of monthly active internet users are 574 million(0.57 billion).(Reference)

In this article, we’ll see what is the internet, how is India connected to the Internet and how are Indians accessing it today.

Happy Birthday To You !!!

Every year on 15th August, the Indian internet(public internet) celebrates its birthday, alongside the Indian Independence day.

On 15 August 2020, India completed its 25 years of the public Internet.

The Internet

Before talking about the Internet, we need to know what a computer network is:

When we connect two or more computers together, so that they can communicate with each and share information, it forms a computer network. These computers are connected with each other using connection mediums like cables or radio waves.

What is the Internet? In simple terms:

The Internet is a huge computer network having several billion computers connected together. This computer network is spread across the globe and connects computers worldwide using various connecting mediums. These computers communicate with each other for sharing information and for accessing services like messaging, video calling, video streaming etc.. A set of rules called protocols are used for making the communication easy and reliable. Common protocols used are HTTP, TCP, FTP, SMTP.

Internet history in brief:

In 1969, ARPANET(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was created by the Advanced Research Project Agency(ARPA) of the United States Department Of Defence. It was the first computer network in the world. In 1983, the TCP/IP protocol was used in the ARPANET for communicating between its connected computers. The TCP/IP protocol was created by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. This protocol is the backbone of today’s Internet. In 1989, the World Wide Web(WWW) system was proposed by an English Scientist named Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN, Switzerland. In 1991, the first web page was made live by Tim Berners-Lee using the WWW system.

Internet In India:

In 1986, India’s first computer network was created by the Department of Electronics(DoE) and was called “Education and Research Network (ERNET)”. ERNET connected eight Indian Educational and Research Institutes.

These eight institutes were: 5 IITs (Kanpur, Kharagpur, Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai), Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, Indian Department of Electronics(DoE), and National Centre for Software Technology (now called C-DAC ) Mumbai.

This Network was not available for the public. In 1995, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited(VSNL) — a state-owned entity made the Internet available to the public. This Internet service was called Gateway Internet Access Service (GIAS) and had International connectivity. GIAS provided a speed of 9.6 kbps and was priced at ₹5000 for 250 hours per month for individuals.

VSNL was later bought by TATA in 2007 and was renamed as “Tata Communications Ltd.”. In 1998, the Indian Government opened up the Internet service sector for private operators. In 2004, the Indian Government introduced its Broadband policy which defined broadband as “an always-on Internet connection with a download speed of 256 kbit/s or above.” In 2005, India’s state-owned telecommunications service provider BSNL launched its Broadband service called “DataOne”. In 2008, another state-owned telecommunications service provider — Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) launched India’s first 3G enabled mobile and data service in Delhi and Mumbai. BSNL followed MTNL and launched its 3G service in 2009, initially in Chennai and Kolkata. In 2009, BSNL and Aksh Optifibre Ltd., collaboratively launched the country’s first Fiber-To-The-Home(FTTH) service in the capital city, New Delhi. In 2010, both 3G and 4G radio spectrums were allocated to private operators. In 2010, Tata Docomo was the first private telecom operator to launch 3G services in India. In 2012, Airtel became the first telecom company to offer 4G services in India.

Internet Service Providers In India

Top ISPs in India are Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea Limited, BSNL, ACT Fibernet, Hathway, and GTPL Broadband Pvt. Ltd.

We’ll talk about the levels of ISPs later.

You, ISP, and the Internet

For this section, imagine that you have bought a brand new computer and you have no internet connectivity in your house.

When you start your computer and open your web browser to search for “XYZ” on google.com(your default search engine), you are trying to access the Internet. Here you are trying to access some information(XYZ) stored on some computer(google’s computer)connected to the Internet. This “some computer” has the information stored on its storage and it will serve you with the information about XYZ if your request reaches it.

Since this computer will “serve” you with the information, hence its called a “server”.

This google server might be located across the pacific ocean, in the USA. But how can you connect to this server? You don’t have any cable connecting from your computer to this google server, right?

What you can do is, you can request access to the cables that are already laid by various Internet Service Providers(ISPs). You will make a phone call to an ISP that provides Internet service in your area. You will pay them the charges so that they can give you access to their cables and you can connect to this google server. They will come to your house and will connect their cable to your computer.

Now, you can surf the Internet using your ISP’s cables.

Who owns the Internet?

The Internet is not owned by anybody. We all contribute to the internet by connecting our devices to it. To access the internet-connected computers, you have to pay for the connecting mediums like cables or radio waves that are owned or leased by your Internet service provider. Your Internet Service Providers are charging you for using their connecting mediums and not for the content.

How does India connect to the Internet?

There are long and very strong submarine cables laid across the world through oceans that keep the Internet working. These are fiber optics cables and are laid by large organizations. A country connects to the internet using its submarine cable landing stations.

India has 15 submarine cables landing stations across 5 cities. These 5 cities are :

Mumbai Chennai Cochin Thiruvananthapuram Tuticorin(Thoothukudi)

So basically, “most” of the internet traffic which the Indians generate will flow through any one of these 5 cities.

Why “most” and not “all” traffic? Because if a user is accessing information from a server which is located in India, then there is no need to route the traffic outside India through these stations.

Mumbai and Chennai handle more than 95% of India’s international Internet traffic. Mumbai has 14 and Chennai has 6 submarine cables coming-in that connects various parts of the world.

Major service providers who have laid their cables around the world are:

Tata Communications: Owns 5 cable landing stations. Bharti Airtel: Owns 3 cable landing stations. Reliance JIO: Owns two cable landing stations. Global Cloud eXchange (formerly Reliance Globalcom): Owns two cable landing stations.

Other service providers owning cable landing stations include BSNL, Vodafone, Sify Technologies, and IOX.

Some of the major submarine cables that improve India’s Internet connectivity includes:

SEA-ME-WE 3 cable

“The South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 3" submarine cable was completed in 1999 with a total length of 39,000 Kilometers and connecting 39 landing stations. Major connecting landing stations include Norden(Germany), Alexandria (Egypt), Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Karachi, (Pakistan), Mumbai, Kochi, Tuas (Singapore), Shanghai (China), Okinawa (Japan). SEA-ME-WE 4 cable

“The South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4" submarine cable was completed in 2005 with a total length of around 18,800 kilometers. It connects South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Europe FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) cable

The “Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe” cable has a length of 28,000 kilometers and connects the United Kingdom, India, and Japan. It was laid by Global Cloud Xchange, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications. Europe India Gateway (EIG) cable

The “Europe India Gateway” has a length of 15,000 kilometers and lands on the Bharti Airtel’s Mumbai cable landing station. This cable connects the United Kingdom, Libya, Monaco, Saudi Arabia, France, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and India.

You can get the complete map of submarine cables here.

There are 3 types of Internet Service Providers (ISPs): Tier-1 ISPs, Tier-2 ISPs, and Tier-3 ISPs.

These global submarine cables are laid by Tier-1 ISPs.

Tier-2 ISPs provide national connectivity and Tier-3 ISPs provide local level connectivity.

You get your internet connection to connect to the Internet from a Tier-3 ISP.

Mobile data pricing in India

According to a UK-based price comparison website(cable.co.uk), India has the cheapest mobile data in the world. The average price of 1 Gigabyte(GB) of Internet data in India costs $0.09 which was ₹6.66 in February 2020.

India was followed by Israel($0.11) and Kyrgyzstan($0.21) for 1GB of mobile data.

Let's have some fun

The world’s first website by Tim Berners-Lee :

The Wayback Machine:

Using this digital archive, you can go back in time to view the snapshots of websites and see how a website looked like in the past. For example, here’s how Twitter looked back in March 2001.

The first Tweet:

The first tweet was posted on 21 Mar 2006 at 4:50 PM by Its co-founder Jack Dorsey. Back then, “Twitter” was called “twttr”.

The founder of Medium.com, Evan Williams is also one of the co-founders of Twitter. Thanks Evan.

The First Video on YouTube:

YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim posted the first video on YouTube on April 23, 2005 at 20:31:52 PDT.

Amazon’s first job listing by Jeff Bezos in 1994:

Conclusion

So remember, the Internet is a very huge computer network, no one owns the internet and we all “connect” to the internet by renting the cables laid by the internet service providers.

This was a very high-level overview of the Internet and how India connects to the Internet. There are a lot more things going on behind the scenes. But for now, this is enough for this article.

Thank you for reading.

Read my other articles at iamnirajwagh.medium.com

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