India in danger of missing Internet revolution: Google’s Eric Schmidt

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has warned that a lack of infrastructure and adequate technology meant that India was in very real danger of missing the Internet revolution completely.

Speaking to Managing Editor of CNBC TV 18, Senthil Chengalvarayan, Schmidt said, “I’m worried that India, having been satisfied with the great success of their IT revolution, have made the same mistake many companies do – they rested on their laurels without understanding how quickly technology changes”

Schmidt was referring to a severe lack of fibre optic connectivity in India, which has been widely acknowledged to be the future of high speed Internet. (More on that here)

“India’s connectivity to the net has always weak. There are insufficient undersea cables to handle the bandwidth, fibre optic cables are proprietry instead of public and infrastructure didnt get enough attention”, said Schmidt while attempting to answer why the Internet revolution is bypassing the country.


Having said that however, the Google CEO said that all was not bleak, because his meetings with a number of people had indicated that there was a huge commitment to righting many of those wrongs and establishing fibre optic networks and mobile networks in India within the next year.