Silver Jubilee of Internet Launch in India by VSNL on 15th Aug, 1995, remembering our Unsung Heroes who brought Internet to India

As the clock ticked 8 AM in our watches, while unfurling the tricolor on the occasion of India’s Freedom Celebration on 15th August, 1995, CMD of VSNL, Mr. BK Syngal announced the launch of GIAS (Gateway Internet Access Services) amidst the drizzle of Mumbai, with raindrops dancing in celebration. Holding our umbrellas, we heaved a sigh of relief that finally our months of efforts paid off and we could see the light at the end of the tunnel – our happiness knew no bounds today!

Little did we know that we were heading for a roller coaster ride and the launch of the Internet was just the beginning. What followed thereafter was an exciting journey!

The launch of Internet Services paved the way for a digital revolution in the country and created a buzzing and strong eco-system, adding a fourth entry to the famous slogan – Roti, Kapda, Makaan and Internet!

Probably for the first time, we had TCP/IP network of this size & scale, which gave the momentum and drive for networking in India.

I had the privilege and honor to work with an inspiring young team of GETs(Graduate Engineer Trainee) recently graduated from Engineering Colleges who joined VSNL and helped build the Internet for India. We formed a core team distributed across all Metro Cities to plan, execute, and operate with a free hand from the management. I fondly remember the core team and invite you to join me in recognizing the perseverance and never-say-die spirit of our True Heroes – GP Singh (Mr. Dependable), Deepak Mittal (The man of all seasons), Parantap Lahiri (Captain Cool), Suneel G (Intelligent boy), Prabhat Singh (Alpha Mail), Manoj Koshti, Rishi Mehta (Master of stories – let us be clear first), ER Prasad(ERP), Late Piramnagam, Sant Kr Chalka (Saint), Koel Chakrabarty (Bong Brain), Ashok Kumar (Brilliant Madrasi), Vineet Mittal (Man with fire in the belly), UC Burman (Babu Moshain), Late Morgaonkar (Man with the Golden Heart), Almeida (Seasoned Personality), CP Reddy (Reddy always Ready to help), Kapil Jain, I Arul, Vivek Baweja, Harpreet S Arora (Friend & Philosopher), Manish Agrawal, Dheeraj Bhagat(Maratha Stalwart), Seshu Narayana, Manvendra Galchhaniya, Braham Khurana (Running for visibility), Ashish Ahuja (Brilliant Punjabi Negotiator), Anil Jha(Gentleman), Nitin Mishra, Alpesh Khatri , Swarnalatha , Sanjay Saxena and Dr Raj Mehta.

How can I ever forget our team representing DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) – Shyam Matathe (Photogenic Face in Amitabh Kumar’s words), Rasesh Mugatwala (Mr. Fix it… Don’t worry), Prasoon Thakur (He was a true Gabbar Singh), Peter DJ Maine , R Devarajan(RD or R&D) and Girdhar Java (My name is Bond… James Bond).

It would be interesting to note that GET and some of us had gained a lateral entry into VSNL. This led to a bit of challenge for us while rolling out the services since we faced internal cooperation issues. However, we were so enthusiastic to launch Internet Services that we lifted servers and other equipment ourselves from ground floor to 9th floor (Gateway POP) of our Fort office, and young GETs even took to punching of Telephone lines. Given the fact that we had several operational issues and infrastructure build happening simultaneously, most of us would often end up spending sleepless nights at the VSNL office and if time permitted, we slept in the Equipment Room. 

As I think back of those times, it was truly an experience to surf the internet for the first time – when we turned on the first connectivity between MCI and VSNL, the famous 64 kbps link. One day, just a few weeks before the launch of Internet Services, in the middle of night when the Internet Lease Line of 64kbps was established and the internet connection came up, our partner Prasoon, full of enthusiasm, or call it euphoria, ran across the hall and dragged Harpreet Singh to show him a web page on Netscape browser ??. Years later, Harpreet confessed that at that time he didn’t understand what happened, but looking at Prasoon and his joy, he could gauge that something big had happened.

At the outset, the Internet launch was done for a limited number of cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Pune. We ran into some technical issues at Bangalore and hence, we could not launch Bangalore during the first phase. It was not too long after the launch of Internet Services that we faced some major brickbats from media as well as the IT Industry for not having Silicon Valley launched along with rest of the cities. After burning the midnight oil for the next couple of weeks, Bangalore went live too! ??

The initial network of 6 POPs was connected via 2X64 kbps links with MCI through Mumbai on satellite (Intelsat 359 degree). Mumbai was the gateway location while rest of the POPs were connected to Mumbai in a star topology. We offered Dial Up and Leased Line services to retail and enterprise customers, respectively. Initially, the dial-up capacity was 32/16 lines, I think. In fact, I remember we could get only 4 Class C IP addresses from APNIC.

The real fun started post the launch of Internet Services ??. We saw a huge surge in demand for Internet Services and an exponential growth in our subscriber base. Growing number of customers can never be bad news for any business but, our infrastructure was not built to cater to this kind of demand and our market assessment studies went for a complete toss. We were soon at the receiving end of significant media bashing and were plagued by increasing customer complaints. Already faced by criticism about quality of service, capacity, and speed, what added further fuel to the fire was the drop connection issue courtesy 3 minutes’ beep introduced by MTNL/ DOT wherein Motorola Modems failed to hold the connection. It took a lot of follow up before DOT & MTNL finally agreed to remove the beep from dial up lines (Data Lines).

With media pressure and customer complaints continuing to mount like a tsunami under formation, I remember Mr. Syngal making the statement at one of the cyber conferences in Mumbai, "I goofed up. I goofed up big time. Our market intelligence was wrong, which meant that our sizing of the requirement was wrong. And there were technical problems that we never anticipated would turn out to be that serious. It was a bit of an amateurish venture. But the reasons I wanted to speak to you are, one, that I goofed up, and two, we have the game plan to build the system into a world-class system. We have carried out studies as to what is required, and I need 10 weeks from you. The plan is going to cost me ?10-15 crore, but that is not your problem. I can assure you that at the end of 10 weeks, possibly before that, you will have a system that India will be proud of."

So now we had a herculean task staring at us in our face and it instantly put us on our toes without getting a chance to wipe the sweat off our brow. I must acknowledge though that in my three decades of career, I have never come across a leader who could stand up and accept mistakes in public like this. Of course, Mr. Syngal was famous for straight talk and would give his piece of his mind without mincing his words ever. While we had always known his nature, this time he was tough and strictly meant business. I remember him saying “SANKAR, fix the service or leave”. He never called me Sonker, for reasons best known to him. Mr. Amitabh Kumar, Director (Operations), and a thorough gentleman, came to our rescue and he gave the commitment to the CMD that he would work with us to fix the issues. I must mention that Mr. Syngal and Mr. Kumar had tremendous faith in us and gave us a free hand to turn around the services. Despite VSNL being a PSU, I was given approval on an immediate basis for fixing capacity issues: dial-up access, inter-city capacity, Internet Port/International capacity and server farm for authentication, portal and mail etc. to the tune of ?10 crore to start with.

We decided on a three-pronged approach. 1) Fixing immediate crisis in terms of adding capacity and resolving underlying service issues. 2) Re-design of Network Architecture – for Scale, Capacity and moving to dynamic routing (OSPF, BGP4) to support 40+ POPs rolled out along with DOT in line with Global ISPs/Backbone. 3) ISP Infrastructure Design/Architecture (Internal Code Name “ISP-Relaunch”) which cost an additional investment of ?10 crore if my memory serves me correctly.

The team was burning the candle at both ends to place orders for major capacity augmentation for Modems Racks, Dial Up lines of MTNL/DOT, intercity capacity, and IP Transit to meet the demand. I still remember that one of the top journalists visited my office one day and saw us busy filling up forms for applying for PSTN lines and the next day she carried an article about it in a leading newspaper. And guess what… we got pulled up yet again ??

Very soon, DOT asked VSNL to introduce Internet Services to Tier 2 Cities as well – state capitals to start with. We started launching Internet Services in state capitals from 1996 onwards. On a personal note, it was during my visit to Lucknow in 1996 to launch Internet Services that I got engaged to my wife – we tied the knot in 1997.

It was during the same period of 1996-97 that we went through major network architecture and design change. We had limited expertise in our country for managing a network of our size. To top it, we had serious Routing issues in the growing network – static routing just could not scale. Fortunately, Sharad Sanghi, CEO NTT Netmagic, had by now returned from US after building network for ISPs in US and he played a crucial role in transforming our network to a state-of-the-art network and in line with Global ISPs, along with Data Craft who picked up the contract for supply and Installation of Cisco Routers & Switches. Sharad became the Routing Guru and gentleman friend for all of us. We also got immense support from Cisco Advance Services led by Praveen Akkiraju and Barry Green, to migrate to a scalable architecture and they also helped us to move to dynamic routing in the network.

While we transformed the network, we also wanted to transform ISP Services (ISP-Relaunch) working with the team from Wipro led by PR Desai (PRD),G Unnikrishnan, Swapnil Shah and Prasoon Saxena. We deployed the Portal Billing System and Mail Service (Send mail, SMTP, POP3), DNS, AAA, Web Portal on Sun Microsystem Platform in a distributed architecture to help us to scale services and have carrier grade infrastructure and operations. This also helped us in offering personalized mail IDs like [email protected] instead of [email protected] 

So far, VSNL had never been in the space of Retail Services to the scale and magnitude as in the case of Internet Services, and consecutively Customer Support had been more reactive in nature. Until now, corrective steps used to be taken based on customer feedback but now, the time for a transformation had arrived. During the early days of Internet in India, we witnessed a variety of Dial Up TCP/IP stack and modems which made life interesting for customers as well as engineers at the helpdesk. Unlike today’s sophisticated Call Centers, we used to have Regional Helpdesk to support customers. In fact, in the initial period of Internet launch, all of us used to take customer calls on the Helpdesk number. Some members of the Core Group became so popular that the customers would only want to talk to them for their issue resolution. This, however, offered us good insights into the customer’s mind and into what could be done differently.

Further, in order to help our customers detect and fix issues, Dr Raj Mehta, a Stanford Professor, helped us with the “Internet User Guide” (The Guide: https://guide2net.org) which turned out to be a boon for us as well as customers. I still need to find out how Dr Raj managed to build a community of users and techies to help customers fix their issues. This was simply amazing.

Recalling one of the interesting episodes, there was this instance when all Helpdesk lines were engaged and hence the operator transferred a customer call to me. I guided the customer on how to resolve her issues. She noted my name and post that episode, she would always request the operator to connect to me whenever she faced any issue. Her famous suggestion was “Please don’t touch the infrastructure. It works well on its own. Once you guys touch it, the service goes down.” Sometime later, there was a raging issue regarding censorship of IP Telephony and one of the reporters from a leading newspaper quoted me on the front page, “Neeraj Sonker GM Internet Services said NO COMMENTS when enquired about censorship for IP Telephony”. After reading this article, this customer of mine called me and pulled me up for not sharing my designation. My simple answer to her was, “You needed help and all of us are here to help you.” It is a different story that I had to face some music later because as a protocol, only Directors and Marketing Head were allowed to interact with the media. 

Around this same period, I got to experience hands-on what is the real meaning of personalized customer service. Our CMD Mr. BK Syngal sent out an email from his account to all customers directly asking them to share their feedback on the service. I and my team would get swamped with these feedback mails; we would plan corrective actions around each of those and close loop the same with the customers as well as CMD office. Every single day, we religiously spent the first two hours going through each mail and acting on them. We even helped ISPs/Carriers and Enterprise customers to configure their routers and connect them. Such was the passion we held in our hearts.

While we continued to augment infrastructure and capacity to meet customer growth, what was lacking was an interactive platform like today’s Social Media where one could interact and collaborate with customers, channel partners and other stakeholders to move forward. The Internet User Club of India (IUC) soon came into play to bridge this gap. IUC was chaired by late Mr. Shammi Kapoor along with Vijay Mukhi and Miheer Mafatlal – they used to religiously meet the VSNL leadership team led by Mr. BK Syngal and Mr. Amitabh Kumar, at the VSNL Fort office. Of course, the idea was to seek feedback and improve services. It is heartening to see that some of the members of this club reaped the benefits of the Internet economy and eco-system and are big entrepreneurs today ??. On the personal front, my wife still fondly remembers Late Shammi Kapoorji and his wife. After our wedding, my wife and I were invited to Mr. Shammi Kapoor’s residence over lunch and it was very nice of Mrs. Kapoor to give shagun to my wife.

As I travel down the memory lane, I’m reminded of many interesting episodes and instances that have left an indelible memory and a learning for life. One such story is about long email addresses such as [email protected] – at that time we were using DEC UNIX system and we had a limitation of 8 characters for username and hence one of the ideas was to opt for alphanumeric combination to generate maximum permutations of user IDs to get scalability. In the subsequent ISP Re-launch project, we managed to fix the username/mail ID issue post migration to Sun Microsystem and configured to reflect shorter and personalized mail IDs and domain name such as [email protected]

The Monsoon Bonanza Launch of that time is a marvelous example of self-inflicted injury. While we were struggling with the burden of managing customer expectations and simultaneously building capacity to serve the customer, our young lad from the marketing team became super enthusiastic to increase the customer base and impulsively launched the “Monsoon Bonanza”. Dropping the price by 50% led to a sudden spike in the customer base and usage, which our infrastructure was not geared up to support, leading to major customer issues. As a result, we all learnt the demand and supply principle of economics in the hard way.

Some lessons were also learnt while we were under Security attack to Servers carrying user profiles. In order to harden these UNIX Servers, the DEC Engineer deleted some key system files and it took us the whole night to configure and restore services. But then, such instances were all part of the learning curve for us, albeit at a serious cost. They have come to shape us the way we stand today.

Over the period of 5 years starting 1995 and post liberalization of ISP license and Internet Gateway in 1997, I saw international connectivity moving from Satellite to Cable Network and a huge number of ISPs got into the race to offer Internet Services. But even today, our hearts are filled with immense joy and pride as we reminisce bringing Internet to India for the first time – after all “First Love is First Love”.

On a closing note, I am reminded of the quote “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step” which covers the acquisition of VSNL by Tata Group in 2002, and the merger with Teleglobe Tier 1 IP Transit Backbone and Tyco Global Network in 2006, which paved the way for current Internet Services supporting IZO suite of products – cloud, SDWAN and Direct Internet Access across 100+ Countries.

While some of the members of the VSNL Core Team moved on to greener pastures, few of us continued our journey with VSNL/Tata Communications – Planning and rolling out the largest Metro Ethernet for Triple Play at that time, a Global MPLS Network of 120+ POPs, Integration of VSNL AS 4755 with Teleglobe 6453 post acquisition of Teleglobe Inc by VSNL in 2005-06, setting up the first GDC and migration of processes and systems from Montreal to Pune along with subsequent O&M, and ensuring that our flag remains high and flying for the times to come. Signing off with fond memories of many friends and customers who contributed throughout this journey… and apologies if I missed anyone’s names… Each of you will always remain invaluable!

Happy Independence Day!

Neeraj Sonker