How is India connected to the internet?

India's combined internet speed is 36,000 Gbps!

Where does your Internet service provider get internet from? 

How does Internet reach India? 

Let us dive into the world of networking .

More than 99% of the internet traffic relies on high quality fiber optic cables connecting various countries. Only a minuscule part of the traffic goes through satellites.

These cable networks are laid and maintained by various governments and giant companies. Such projects are usually undertaken by multiple companies due to the large cost of investment. There are three tiers which differentiates the size of the network held by a company.

Tier-1 :- This are the companies which have a global network connecting so much cables around the world that they don't need to pay anyone any fee to access any destination on the internet. They usually can access the network of other tier-1 companies without paying any fee. This network acts as the backbone of the internet.

Tier-2 :- These are companies which have a regional networks and are usually connected to one or more tier-1 networks. They have to pay a fee to access the tier-1 company's network.

Tier-3 :- These are the Internet Service Providers(ISPs) from whom we buy our broadband connections. They are the last tier, connecting the internet to the end users.

India is connected to the world at Mumbai, Cochin, Chennai and Tuticorine. All of our international internet traffic goes through these port cities. The place where the international cables connect to the land is called landing stations.

Tata Communications owns 3 landing stations at Mumbai, Chennai and Cochin. They are the only Tier-1 company from India.

Bharti Airtel owns 2 landings stations at Chennai and 1 at Mumbai.

Reliance Globalcom owns 1 landing station at Mumbai.

Sify Technologies owns 1 landing station at Mumbai

BSNL owns 1 landing station at Tuticorine connecting to Srilanka.

Handing over of traffic from one network to another is called peering. There is a non profit government organization in India called National Internet Exchange of India(NIXI) which allows Indian ISPs to use each others network in an efficient manner rather than using foreign servers. This also increases the quality of service for the consumers and decreases the chances of data being snooped by foreign agencies such as NSA. NIXI created inRegistry in 2005 to start .in domain. (The website names with .in extension.)  

Networks within India

There are several networks within India, one of them is RailTel- a government project started in 2000 to lay fiber optic cables along the routes of the railyway tracks. These cables are capable of bandwidth upto 400Gbps and have redundancy systems which re-routes the traffic incase of any malfunction at any point. They have a network of over 30,000KM.

National Optical Fibre Network

This is a project started in 2011 to connect over 250,000 Grama Panchayaths via high speed fiber optic cable at a cost of Rs 20,000 crore. The plan was to use the existing optical fiber networks of RailTel, BSNL and powergrid to extend the network to more locations.  The aim is to bring a minimum of 100Mbps connectivity to each Grama Panchayath. As of 2015, only 40% of the planned network has been completed, the biggest hurdle is stated as 'right of way problem' which in simple words means people are not allowing to lay cable over their land.  

Internet Usage

India used 967 petabytes per month in 2014 and is increasing at a rate of 33% per year. It is expected that it will grow to 4 Exabytes by 2019.  According to a newspaper report from 2013, India has a total international bandwidth of 33,900 Gb per second although only around 6,009Gbps are ready to use while only 1,110Gbps are consumed. Certainly this figures must have increased by now.  

Check it yourself

If you are on a PC running Windows:-

1. Open your command prompt. (Search CMD in windows search )
2. Type tracert google.com

If you are on a MAC or Linux system:-

1. Open Terminal
2. Type traceroute google.com

You will now see the IP addresses of all the devices through which you are connected to Google's server along with the response time it took at each stage. This helps in knowing the path/cables through which your information is being passed. You can try some other websites too.

Internet Disconnected.

Now, for the evil minds out there, it is possible to disconnect a country from internet by cutting these cables. In 2012, the only cable connecting Bangladesh to the international network was cut off and they lost their internet for nearly a month. Similar incidents have cut off internet to Myanmar multiple times.  

In July 2005, a portion of the SEA-ME-WE 3 submarine cable located 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Karachi that provided Pakistan's major outer communications became defective, disrupting almost all of Pakistan's communications with the rest of the world, and affecting approximately 10 million Internet users.

In March 2007, pirates stole an 11-kilometre (7 mi) section of the T-V-H submarine cable that connected Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong, afflicting Vietnam's Internet users with far slower speeds. The thieves attempted to sell the 100 tons of cable as scrap.

Comment if you have any query.