American consultancy firm Frost & Sullivan has predicted a growth of 93.6 per cent in bandwidth demand for Internet access services between March 2000 and March 2005.

In its report on the telecom industry, "Indian bandwidth requirement for Internet Services (2000 -2005)," the firm has said that the bandwidth requirement, which at the end of the previous fiscal was 1.3 Gbps, will almost double to 2.4 Gbps during the current fiscal and is projected to reach 35.4 Gbps by the end of 2004-05.

"This projection takes into consideration only the bandwidth requirement by the ISPs for the provision of Internet access services. The international bandwidth requirement for data centres and IT exports have not considered in this report," Anil Joseph, Manager, Telecom business, said. "The bandwidth growth rate is higher than the subscriber growth rate," he said.

Nasscom in its report had projected an Internet bandwidth demand of 300 gigabytes (gb) by 2005 which could be met through allowing interconnectivity across multiple networks, allowing IT-enabled services to set up their own international gateways.

According to Nasscom, presently only 325 mbps of international bandwidth is available for Internet from India while the demand has touched 5gb (one gb is equal to approx 1000 mbps) and is further expected to swell to 10 gb by end 2000. The report also said that the Internet subscriber base in India is expected to grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 81.7 per cent by March 2005. The subscriber base at the end of March 2000 is estimated at 0.7 million and is likely to reach 1.47 million at the end of March 2001 rising further to 13.8 million by March 2005.

The higher growth rate for bandwidth requirement is due to the growing share of broadband access services in the total market. Factors like the introduction of broadband Internet access services like direct subscriber link (DSL) and Cable, corporates’ move towards the Internet platform and growth of IT-enabled services are expected to drive the demand for bandwidth requirement.