Computers Today, August 1-15, 2000; Chief Guest

August 1-15, 2000 CHIEF GUEST

"It's nice to see bandwidth getting commoditised here"

Pradeep Sindhu, founder of Juniper Networks, has played a central role in architecture design and development of M40 router, the first Net backbone router. During his recent trip to India, in a chat with Computers Today's Sudhir Chowdhary, Sindhu cut across the bandwidth brouhaha.

Juniper has been a late entrant in India. Why?

Not really. Given the fact that we're only four years old, and it's now that we are under the process of expansion of our global sales, services and support capabilities. In fact, our subsidiary in India is the sixth Juniper Networks office in the Asia-Pacific region. And we have come in at the right time. The Union Government has announced major initiatives aimed at propelling the development of infotech and telecom infrastructure in the country. More significant is the Government's decision to ease the bandwidth crunch, thereby marking an end of state monopoly in submarine optical fibre connectivity.

Do you expect the bandwidth crunch to be solved through private initiatives?

With creaky dial-up connections and a substantial state stronghold, India's Internet industry is still a laggard. But the flood of private investment announced lately could make wobbly connections a thing of the past. Along with the Internet service providers (ISPs), a new breed of 'pipe dreamers' is evolving, pumping in thousands of crore rupees in the first phase alone. They are building up fibre optic backbones and high-speed pathways to speed up access. Old economy giants that dominated textiles, petrochemicals and engineering sectors, are now jumping on the bandwidth bandwagon. A recent report said that private sector leaders and state-run giants have lined up investments totalling at least $5 billion to build domestic fibre optic networks. If most of the planned projects were implemented, there would be a glut of bandwidth in the country. Of course, it would take some time for that to happen.

But experts say that bandwidth can never be enough in an apllications-hungry world.

At present it's scarce. And it's not a localised issue. The developments taking place in India are in tune with international trends, where backbone bandwidth is increasingly getting commoditised. An Indian customer told me that rather than business driving bandwidth in India, we have bandwidth driving business. Many companies today are delaying application deployment because of bandwidth constraint. Those who have been more optimistic and have gone for the new bandwidth -hungry applications have suffered.

Many organisations have implemented high-speed LANs. A large number of them have gone for fast Ethernet and quite a few for Gigabit. In the applications that are restricted to local area, this has eased down things. But it has created more problems for the wide area. In many organisations, the Internet can be accessed through LAN by almost everybody in the organisation. A 128 Kbps leased-line is used sometimes by as many as 150 users. You can imagine the speed. A simple E-mail application can get stuck for hours together.

However, it's nice to see global bandwidth providers like SEA-ME WE2 and FLAG, who have huge capacities available with them, along with Project Oxygen, focussing on India. The reason is simple: growth in the Indian Internet infrastructure market is among the highest in the world.

Who are your major competitors?

Cisco is our main competitor, and its major strength lies in its incumbency. I personally feel that Cisco and Juniper will both win as market growth is faster than both companies'. Customers want more than one supplier. Even otherwise, our multi-gigabit M-series Internet backbone routers deliver Internet-based traffic up to 10 times faster than other products in the market.

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