This was the first time internet service was introduced in Nepal

This was the first time internet service was introduced in Nepal

Now internet has become an indispensable necessity for every person. The Internet, which started in 1993 to facilitate email service, is now established as the basis of many fields such as online communication, social networking, teaching-learning, online payment, telehealth, public service, virtual meeting, automation.

How was this service introduced in Nepal for the first time? What was the technology, available manpower, market situation at that time? What kind of ups and downs have come to introduce the Internet? You may also have many questions.

Sanjeev Rajbhandari, the founder of Mercantile Communications, is credited with introducing the Internet in Nepal. Sanjeev Rajbhandari, who started his IT business around 1983, had already done a lot of work in the field of information technology before the introduction of the Internet. At that time, networking was considered a very big thing, which was called novel networking.

There were mini computers and mainframe computers in connected computers. At that time, Outer Watch computers used to cost 500,000, 1000,000 or 2000,000 US dollars. Then IBM introduced the PC. Great progress has been made in the field of networking.

Around 1991, Mercantile collaborated with Nabil Bank and Union Bank of the Middle East to develop a complete banking system based on personal computers, which was named Nabsis. This system was later installed in Nabil Bank branches.

Thus, before bringing internet to Nepal, Mercantile was active in various fields of information technology such as software development, hardware, computer, networking.

At the same time, the email service started around 1990, it was not based on the Internet as it is now, but a corporate email. "If we had to send an email to Acer or IBM, we would dial into their Singapore server and send the message," he says, "and they would pick up our message from there."

Sanjeev had never heard of the Internet in 1990. It was only in 1992 that he came to know about it for the first time. It was new to him that he could send e-mails through the Internet.

In this way, every company had to drop and drag emails by dialing the respective server.

Sanjeev, who was interested in email, had not heard of the Internet in 1990. It was only in 1992 that he came to know about it for the first time.

It was new to him that he could send e-mails through the Internet. Especially in the early days, the internet was used in universities and government offices in America. But commercially, it had not yet started.

In the early days (1992-1993), Mercantile started providing email services to a small number of customers by connecting to ER (Academic and Research Network of India) Net and Connect.com.au through dialup service. At that time email service was very expensive in Nepal.

At that time, the charge was Rs 10 per kilobyte, and Rs 150 was charged per minute. However, at that time when faxes cost 100 rupees per page, emails costing from 10 rupees to 100 rupees used to be cheaper.

Until the beginning of 1994, Nepal did not have its own domain (dot np). As a result, customers were forced to work through dot in (in India) or dot au (in Australia) domains.

But in mid-1994, Australia's Connect.com helped Mercantile establish the dot np domain. That's why even today some domains of dotnp domain are backed up in Australia.

In 1995, Singapore Telecom (Singtel) started Internet business. At the same time, Sanjeev contacted Singtel asking Mercantile to assist in providing internet services in Nepal.

Singtel's Internet branch could not take that decision. Then he went to Singapore to convince the CEO of Singtel.

After listening to Sanjeev, the CEO agreed and Mercantile became the first company to provide internet to Singtel. Not only that, Mercantile succeeded in becoming a pioneer company to start internet services in Nepal.

Initially, the capacity of the Nepal-Singapore link was a digital leased line of 4.8 Kb, after some time, the link was upgraded to 33.8 Kb after installing a high-capacity modem from Motorola. At that time, customers in Nepal used text-based Linux browsers to browse the Internet.

At the beginning of 1996, the link capacity was upgraded to a digital line of 64 KB. According to Sanjeev, the price of which is 12 lakh rupees per month.

"We bought half of the circuit from Nepal Telecom and half from Singtel," he says, "only after that we could use Netscape and Mosaic browser to browse the Internet. After that, even email charges became significantly cheaper.” Starting the Internet in Nepal was as exciting as it was challenging.

Sanjeev remembers those days with ups and downs, "Because we didn't know anything about it. When I started the business, there were no engineers in Nepal. As many as there were engineers, all were with the National Computer Center (NCC). After that, we trained and prepared the necessary manpower."

In 1994/95, engineers from India, America and other countries started returning to Nepal gradually. Sanjeev hired eight-nine engineers in his internet division. That was before the commercialization of the Internet.

“I called my friend in America and asked him to give me the regular Cisco number. The San Francisco number used to start with 408. So we called there and said we were speaking from Nepal. Let us know that we have your router and are having problems with it. But the Cisco engineer will consider it a 'prank call'. He never heard of Nepal before that. "My name is Napoleon Bonaparte" and hung up the phone.

But none of the first batch of engineers who established email and internet business through Mercantile stayed in Nepal. Most of them are in the US and some in the UK. However, Sanjeev says they are doing well.

Mercantile's office was on Durbarmarg. At that time dialup was based on Internet phone lines. But it was very difficult to get a phone line. "We had to pay about two lakh rupees for a single phone line," says Sanjeev, "We started dialup internet with eight telephone lines. We would have had to go to the market to get that telephone line, it would have been very difficult to get it from the Telecommunications Institute at that time."

The capacity of the telephone line of the telecommunications institute was limited, and there was no connection on Darbarmarg where Mercantile was located. Since he did not have the necessary skills and resources, everything became challenging. In this case, getting help from elsewhere was a matter of compulsion for Mercantile.

For that, he had to go from Singapore to Australia. "Singapore was learning as we wanted to learn. They brought a consultant from America and started the service. Even in Singapore, there was no knowledgeable person to ask anything like this. Everything was a big challenge."

Around Christmas 1994, Cisco routers were introduced in Nepal. Sanjeev used to run the same server himself. But Cisco hangs. Sanjeev's team dug through Cisco's manual, which provided a number to call 1-1800. But the toll-free number of America did not receive calls from Nepal. The system was down. What to do now?

Sanjeev himself was in the office till late at night. “I called my friend in America and asked him to give me the regular Cisco number. The San Francisco number used to start with 408,” he recalls.

"So we called there and said we were speaking from Nepal. We told them we have your router and it's having a problem. But the Cisco engineer thought it was a 'prank call'. He'd never heard of Nepal before. 'My name is Napoleon.' Bonaparte' and hung up the phone.

Then called again. Christmas Day was going on in America. The last call was picked up by an Indian. Sanjeev spoke in English mixed with Hindi. Then the person was ready to help.

After that person suggested how to reboot the Cisco 2501, the system started running. It was difficult to bring goods to Nepal from abroad. Sanjeev had no idea what to bring and how to configure it. Neither knew how to get support.

Internet took commercial form only after Netscape came in 1995/96. Netscape was a popular browser at that time, which helped in the global establishment of dotcom.

On the other hand, many people did not even imagine that the Internet, which was in the form of a research project, would come to the commercial market. There was no one running Unix operating system in Nepal. But Sanjeev started a separate department for that. A couple of people kept cooking.

Mercantile, who had no Unix experience, was unsure whether it could be used or not. At that time, the entire Internet was based on that operating system. However, the company had already started an email business.

The first picture uploaded from Nepal on the Internet

Interestingly, the first picture uploaded on the internet from Nepal was of Lord Ganesha. An American journalist named Jeff Greenwald posted the picture on the Internet.

For Wired's online newsportal, a popular magazine for the Internet, at the time Mercantile and its email And also wrote a news about internet service.

Since Nepal's initial internet link was only 4.8 KB, it was very challenging to send pictures through it.

In an article published in Reference Wired, Greenwald mentioned that it took 14 hours for Rajbhandari's technicians to upload the 1MB sized PNG image.

Later it was uploaded to the internet only after converting it to JPEG format in small size. Thus, in 1995, the first picture from Nepal was uploaded on the Internet, which was sent to Wired in America via email.

Before Skype, there was a company called Vocaltech around 1997/98. Later Intel bought it. Calls could also be made from that platform. At a time when phone calls were very expensive, audio calls became possible through the Internet. But video calling started only after Skype came.

Dialup Internet

In 1992, Sanjeev got in touch with Education and Research Network (ERNET), a government organization in India. "We are also working on research, so we asked if we could be in touch with you," he recalls, "and they agreed, which was a surprise for us."

Because they only wanted to connect with research or academic institutions. It was an internet based email thing.

“At that time, we used dialup modem to contact ERnet in New Delhi. At that time, we provided free services to acquaintances and some INGOs for one and a half years. We were surprised to see that it worked so well. We didn't even think that this would happen," he says.

“We used to call Delhi 10/12 times a day through a 90.2 kbps modem. It was Rs 35 per minute.” India was cheap to dial. Being a government organization of India, ERNET did not give much response.

It used to close after five o'clock in the evening. Meanwhile, Mercantile found an Australian partner. Then Mercantile contacted an Australian company called Connect.com for dialup.

“His service was very good. But the problem is that it used to cost 150 rupees to dial up," those memories are still fresh in Sanjeev's mind. "When our customer base increased, the connection period was two or three hours a day, and the cost would reach up to 20/30 thousand rupees."

Thus, in 1995, Mercantile started commercial internet service for the first time in Nepal. As the expenses started to increase, the company also started collecting fees from the customers.

Later, around 1999, internet link started coming through satellite in the form of V-SAT. Because before that V-SAT was not legal.

Until then, the Internet in Nepal was dependent on the connection of the Nepal Telecommunications Institute. After receiving the direct satellite link, the obligation of the Internet service provider to take the service of the telecommunications company ended.

The nationwide fiber internet network came only around 2007/08. Although the satellite link was good, it was very expensive.

But there was also a 500 millisecond delay. A megabyte of satellite cost two thousand US dollars.

Optical fiber had reached India. Around 2005, the local service provider had developed a relationship with Airtel Bharti to bring an optical fiber link to Nepal.

But 'security clearance' was required for crush border connection. On the other hand, after Airtel did not work on it, Sanjeev and Dilip Agarwal of Worldlink went to Delhi to talk to the company and the security agencies there.

"They made it mandatory to install a LIM (Legal Intercept and Monitoring System) at every border post," he says, "one costing about $1 million."

Even now, all the companies like Tata, Airtel Bharti are connected with Nepal, they have to keep their LIM. But the internet business in Nepal was very small. In this case, they did not show the desire to invest so much and keep the lime. Airtel Bharti had a branch in Singapore.

"After facing the problem, we discussed with them that the traffic of Nepal will not be sent to India but will be sent directly to Singapore. After this, Indians will not have anything to do with Nepal's traffic," he said. If India had to take traffic, it would have to go through Singapore."

Initially, optical fiber connection was established from Bhairahawa and Birganj. Since satellite has 10/20 megabytes, after switching to optical fiber, Nepali internet service providers started taking three to four hundred megabytes at once. At that time, he had to pay US$ 450 per megabyte of bandwidth, says Sanjeev.

Although it was a hundred times more expensive than it is now, it was much cheaper than the satellite link of the time. Now, if an internet service provider buys 100GB of bandwidth, it comes to less than US$5 per megabyte.

In Nepal, the Nepal Electricity Authority had laid fiber optic cable on its high tension line. Nepali internet service providers used the same line to connect Kathmandu to the Indian border.

 

Nepal's first website

Before the website came to Nepal, Mercantile hosted a website called South Asia.com in UK around 1995/096. At that time, the price of a link of 64 KB capacity was Rs. 12 lakhs. Sanjeev says that it has been kept on the UK server to save costs.

"Having a server in Nepal would have cost us a lot of bandwidth if outsiders accessed it," he says, "so we hosted our website on a server in the UK."

It is remembered that Sanjeev kept the contents of UN, Mercantile, Kantipur and Kathmandu Post. Mercantile started Nepal News in 1997.

Before Mercantile Communications started, there was Mercantile Office System (MAS). Because at that time the email project was only a test.

Sanjeev never thought that communication would become a business in the near future. At that time, Nepal did not have its own domain (dot np). The name of Mercantile's website was ms.connect.com.au (Australia).

 

Thus came the dot np domain

Sanjeev still remembers what the Australian partner said at the time, "You are trying to connect with us, but your country doesn't have a domain." Sanjeev started thinking after the Australian partner promised to help for dot np domain.

Still some of Nepal's primary servers are in Australia

"We thought how we should take the domain of the entire country," he says, "Then we talked to Tribhuvan University and Ronast."

Both RONAST (then Nepal Government Institute of Science and Technology and now NAST) and India's ERNET were government organizations. Ronast started the email service by dialing ERnet in Delhi.

Dr. Kedarbhakta Mathema was the Vice-Chancellor of Ronast at that time. "They did not show any desire for me to start the domain of the country," Sanjeev remembers the conversation at the time, "Even though it is a technical organization, he refused, arguing that information technology does not fall under the scope of RONAST."

On the other hand, Tribhuvan University replied that they did not know what the email was. After the government agencies stepped aside, Mercantile took the lead and launched the dot np domain.

Thus Mercantile got the NP domain around 1994. Since the domain was started with the help of Connect.com, some of the primary servers in Nepal are still in Australia.

The dot NP domain has not yet become a state to be handled by the government. So since its inception, Mercantile has been distributing and managing NP domains for free.

“At that time we only did email,” he says, “but we also got the NP domain. That was a big deal for us. All the backup of its primary service was in Australia.”

Legal recognition only 4 years after the internet started

On the other hand, the Internet service that started in 1993 was neither legal nor illegal. Because at that time they did not know what the Internet was, there were no rules for it.

For this, Sanjeev and others started coordinating with the then Ministry of Communication. On the other hand, the World Bank was working with Nepal Telecom. He was lobbying that the Telecommunication Authority should be established.

Thus Nepal Telecommunication Authority was established in 1997. Until then, Mercantile and Worldlink were the only internet service providers.

Bhojraj Pokharel was the secretary of the Ministry of Communication. Later he also became the Chief Election Commissioner. Sanjeev considers him to be a very 'progressive bureaucrat'.

"At that time, the government did not have the practice of calling the private sector for consultation," he says, "but there was Bhupraj Pandey who worked in the ministry along with Bhojraj Pokharel. They used to ask us various things, we used to give our opinion. When the Telecommunication Authority was formed in 1997, most of our suggestions were included in the regulations. Later, Bhupraj Pandey became the first chairman of the authority.

The Internet service, which started in 1993, got legal recognition only after the establishment of the authority in 1997. Thus Mercantile was given the license of the first internet service provider.