Building India's National Internet Backbone

摘要

India is a geographically vast country, located across the Arabian Sea from Saudi Arabia and Africa to the west and across the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean from Myanmar, Malaysia, and the Indonesian archipelago to the east. Only about 27% of its 980 million people live in its cities; the rest live in the countryside in more than 600,000 villages. Here, I describe the Indian Department of Telecommunications' effort (begun July 1997) to address the country's emerging but potentially enormous demand for Internet infrastructure.