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Buck-up Internet infrastructure, Barrett tells India

Fakir Chand in Bangalore

Intel Corporation president and CEO Craig Barrett on Friday urged the Indian government and the industry to expand their Internet infrastructure aggressively to gain a competitive advantage in the geographical region.

Addressing an impressive gathering of over 500 technology and business leaders in India's own Silicon Valley on the topic of 'Investing in the Digital World', Barrett said the sooner every Indian company adopts doing business over the Interent, the faster the acceleration of India's growth opportunities.

"India's businesses have the opportunity to increase the productivity, broaden their customer base and develop greater efficiencies within all aspects of their organisations even as its government takes right development steps."

Barrett said though India's move to privatisation and investment in a fiber backbone was creating a viable telecommunications infrastructure, Indian businesses have to use this infrastructure to take advantage of the emerging growth opportunities.

"The Internet continues to be a key engine of growth in India. Industries that innovate by increasing their digital capacity and embracing the concept of e-business are building a foundation for productivity and competitive gains."

Quoting a Frost & Sullivan research report on India's telecommunications bandwidth anticipating a ten-fold increase by 2004, Barrett commanded that India had already established itself as a world leader in software development, and there was an opportunity now to repeat the success of IT-enabled services and Internet applications.

With such bandwidth capacity and an estimated 30 million Internet users by the same year, India will have the largest and best equipped Internet base in Asia, giving it a considerable e-business advantage.

In this context, Barrett called upon the Indian service industries, which contribute over 40 per cent of India's GDP, to implement e-business solutions to enable borderless expansion.

"Early investments in these areas will help India emerge as a global quality service provider, and its IT industry will benefit from focusing on software development around open architectures and standards."

Describing the emerging technology scenario, Barrett explained the rapid availability of digital capabilities throughout the world, and how Intel's leadership and innovation in silicon manufacturing digital computing and communications were helping drive the trend.

"As the Internet runs on silicon, Intel will continue to bring its technical and manufacturing expertise to focus on volume economics and standards to help speed the Internet build-out throughout India because the global chipmaker provides a unique technology foundation upon which the industry can innovate, grow, and prosper," Barrett asserted.

In his keynote speech, the 62-year-old silicon specialist previewed the direction of computing and communications for the Internet by showing a short film that was produced on a 2Ghz Pentium 4 processor-based PC, demonstrating the transmission of high-definition broadcast video over an Internet Protocol, and scaling video created on a PC, to wireless handheld devices.

Barrett also disclosed that by the current year-end, Intel would be introducing processors based on 0.13-micron technology, begin producing 300-mm wafers and introduce copper metalisation.

"Intel's multi-billion dollar investments in capital expenditures and R&D this year are designed to drive improvements in many areas of products and architectures for the Internet."

Reiterating his faith in the prophecy of Moor's Law that the computing capacity of semi-conductor chips or transistors will double every 18 months, Barrett said what has held good over the last 12-14 years ever since the law came into being, will hold good enough for the next 15-20 years.

"With the expansion of the horizontal markets, the demand for faster micro-processors and thousands of transistors embedded in high conductivity chips will be exponential as more and more applications that go into the new communications devices such as PDAs, cell phones, pocket PCs, etc will call for such capacity operations," Barrett claimed.

Barrett also spoke on the growing application of computing applications in diverse areas of the old economy such as automotive, manufacturing, white goods, transportation, textiles, besides everyday use in healthcare, etc.

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