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Radhika Nallayam of CIOL caught up with Praveen Ganapathy to talk about the market trends and growing need of broadband.According to him, enterprises are making use of broadband to adopt 'centralized storage' model which helps them cut down cost and increase productivity. He believes that applications like online gaming would further push the need for broadband in India.

What are the factors that push the growth of broadband among enterprises? Are they using real bandwidth-hungry applications? Where does India stand now while it comes to broadband?
I think the key drive of broadband among enterprises itself is the coming out of lots of high bandwidth applications. People use more bandwidth hungry applications like video conferencing, high definition, U-Tube etc.
At the same time, in countries like India, enterprises are fast adopting a thin client work model where the storage and applications are on the server.
High bandwidth connection helps to centralize your storage and bandwidth hu8ngry applications and thus reduce cost. It also gives people the flexibility of working from home. It also allows them to work on the move. This in turn helps improve productivity.
I think, primarily, broadband helps reduction in infrastructure cost through the model of centralized application and storage.

India has more than 2 million broadband users. The Union Minister for Communications and IT, Dayanidhi Maran, has declared 2007 as year broadband and to hit a goal of 9 million users by this year-end. This is going to push broadband further in India. Apart from that, upcoming technologies like Wimax are helping to accelerate the growth of broadband.

What are the technology options for broadband? Is DSL still dominating this segment? What will be the future? What is the possibility of Wimax?
The dominating technologies in the broadband arena are DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and cable modems. While in US, cable modems remain the major technology; UK and India depend mainly on DSL. US is also deploying technologies like 'Fibre To The Home (FTTH)'which can give much higher level of bandwidth. Wimax is emerging as a viable option especially in India where the infrastructure for wired connection is still very poor. So, technology adoption is purely regional. TI believes that that over time, DSL and cable modems are going to shift to FTTH. TI is also working on technologies like ADSL2, cable modems and Wimax.