I do not care what the status of Hayai is at this point of time.
I have no idea whether Hayai is a real venture and whether it would indeed launch in India in the near future.
I just have one thing to say. I seriously hope you are real. And Hayai is real. And you manage to launch your operations in the coming weeks/months. And you are able to provide affordable high speed broadband to the Indian consumer. And the quality of service is excellent and it stays like that in the future. And I also hope that you get all the support you need to expand your network throughout the country even though you would be targeting the major cities initially.
You are probably the only hope Indian broadband scene has right now. My experiences dealing with airtel representatives have left me all freaked out. I have spent so much time and effort to get a simple point across. And it is simply not working. I have shown my faith in you since the first post you made on broadbandforum.co long time back. I still have complete faith in your ideology. Just do not prove me and other members of this forum who are rooting for you wrong!
I can assure you, we're very much for real. There are many people who are working hard to get this operation under way. We're jumping through all sorts of hoops in order to get things fast-tracked (including huge amounts of control of the company being relinquished to Indian citizens). But it is a huge battle. If I were able to talk to myself 2 years ago I'd probably try and talk myself out of it, but here I am, 100% committed to bringing this service to life in both India and New Zealand.
In NZ, we're working with
Velocity Networks for our initial fibre rollout in the city of Hamilton.
FX is providing much of our domestic backhaul.
Citylink will be helping us rollout in Auckland and Wellington, as well as providing peering in any of the 27 peering facilities around NZ. And
Kordia has agreed (conditionally) to help us out with International Capacity, Domestic Capacity, Rural and Wireless access, including, potentially our ability to deliver cellular services.
Vocus and
Orcon (a subsidiary of Kordia) will be additional suppliers of transit bandwidth and peering in Sydney, Australia.
Pacific Fibre has offered us a sweetheart deal if we agree to become an anchor tenant on their upcoming international cable.
In India, we're working as you know with
Honesty Net Solutions for helping us roll out in Mumbai, Pune and some other cities are on the map. HNS has also been helping us out on the wireless side too, as well as helping us get a foothold with fiber in their area. We're consorting with them to purchase bandwidth from the big 3 (Bharti, Reliance and
Tata) in order to get the prices down. There has been some talk of Hayai taking over HNS's retail services but it hasn't got past that stage yet.
E2E Networks and another ISP who I can't name yet is working with us in NCR. E2E has been providing us with hosting and will be putting servers in our data centers in order to be part of the Hayai Zone, and they will take care of all the game-server companies who want to host with us.
Railtel has agreed to help us out with inter-city transit.
In both countries, our primary purpose is to build a platform to provide excellent services on, then build the last mile to deliver it. Fortunately, regulations doesn't stop us from actually putting together infrastructure, so we have been able to get things rolling on that side. Unfortunately, this is also the most expensive bit, which is part of the reason some of our charges are comparatively high as compared to other operators. But never to mind, there is plenty of funding for the telecoms market!
After many changes over the last year, Alcatel has been chosen (at least for FTTH platform) since they have some of the best equipment available for delivering what we want to deliver. It's more expensive than some of the other options, but they're doing excellent things in Europe, and I figure that since our aim is to bring European quality Internet to India, it has turned out to be a good match thus far. Their platform is extremely scaleable, and will allow us to migrate from 1 to 10Gbit/s to each home when that time comes, as their latest equipment already supports it, and I'm told will soon be capable of 10Gbit/s symmetrical.
I am still anticipating to be coming to India during March to try and hurry along some of the paperwork - probably in about 2-3 weeks or so. If I am successful in ensuring paperwork is completed and the green-light is given, then we will finally be able to launch very soon after that in all 3 cities - I, more than any of you, am anxious to get this show on the road, especially considering the sheer amount of money that has gone in to Hayai in both countries - many tens of thousands of dollars from my own pockets and more from investors around the world, with still more that has been pledged (though contracts have not been signed).