I believe I met Shubhendu Sharma at an event and if my memory recollects, showed interest in something like this for rural/remote Indian locations, especially the North-East.
That was back then.
In the past few months, Reliance Jio have dropped fibers everywhere even in that edge of India, reaching homes with Gigabit Internet options. I have a friend who invested in a small ISP there and I was interested in that. They no longer don't care and are now piled up with over-time work laying, connecting, and fixing up connections.
I understand the philosophies of choices and alternative options. Nonetheless, what are your plans to compete and/or differentiate when the 99% of people don't really care from where they got their internet?
The other things I see is the likes of StarLink[1], which is not physically bound by wires and is a matter of turning knobs as and when they have enough satellites to cover other areas of the world.
Amongst all of these, where/how do you plan to compete/operate?
OP here. You make some great points that I'd love to address.
- We know from first hand experience that the hype of Jio fiber doesn't reflect on ground reality. We know this because every ISP in Bangalore is a partner of ours. For the last 3 years we have been serving 100s of apartment buildings and tens of thousands of customers using ACT, Hathway, Airtel and Jio's network. We have dozens of instances where none of them can provide connectivity at the edges of the city or dense market areas.
- Our plan doesn't require competing with any of the existing players. Less than 7% of India has broadband access, only 20 million households have broadband access. There's a large open market with room enough for multiple players.
- Our offering to the consumer is also deeply competitive. We're offering gigabit connections with no data caps at one tenth the price of existing providers.
- We're really excited about starlink, but for them to ramp up coverage and then get permission from the Indian government to allow their signals in India and then scale up to being able to provide access to 100s of millions of people is a long way off. Starlink is a great solution, but there are so many people in India that need access that they will be one of many players required in the market.
That was back then.
In the past few months, Reliance Jio have dropped fibers everywhere even in that edge of India, reaching homes with Gigabit Internet options. I have a friend who invested in a small ISP there and I was interested in that. They no longer don't care and are now piled up with over-time work laying, connecting, and fixing up connections.
I understand the philosophies of choices and alternative options. Nonetheless, what are your plans to compete and/or differentiate when the 99% of people don't really care from where they got their internet?
The other things I see is the likes of StarLink[1], which is not physically bound by wires and is a matter of turning knobs as and when they have enough satellites to cover other areas of the world.
Amongst all of these, where/how do you plan to compete/operate?
1. https://www.starlink.com