I was never impressed by American democracy; although it remains a land of milk gold and honey (and for some oversexed women), I disgress. In the same vein, it wasn’t a tectonic shift when the first African American (with a muslim middle name) got elected to their presidency. Atleast for me. It only goes to prove the truth about packaging. If you buy the well sold package, you’d end up in a honey trap.
In the same vein, all eyes are on the announcement for the new FCC chairperson. Why should that matter? For more than one reason, the Broadband scence in US is almost similar to India. We have telcos who are full of sloth, greedy and have a pathetic service to boot. Although, the customers get Mbps speeds, they are constrained by the download limits and the services are damned expensive.
Companies like Google are betting up on opening up the airwaves; they bought huge swathes of spectrum recently in order to run free Wifi services. There is a lot of advocacy for the “community groups”- the traditional conservative middle America full of gun totting rednecks who have never been exposed to the outside world throughout their lives. There is a strong grassroots movement to fund the opening up of the “last mile” access and literally open up the world for them.
I cannot fathom the same movement to open up the airwaves here. Neither I see any degree of urgency here. Despite the headquarters of the telecom exchanges here, we are still to see a large part of Delhi getting lit up by optic fibre reaching the customers.
It would be interesting to catch up with the “american model” of broadband access for Indian scenario. Although, the customers there in US are very vocal about the quality of services that they get here, most of the people would rather accept the status quo and let the telecom companies and the cable providers to screw them royally. Much of the times, the customer are without any choice.
I would be all out for a dedicated free service like WiMax which is community funded. It would be impossible to shut out the freeloaders who would switch on their torrents to dowload porn but in a given society, there are enough rotten apples. But then, this should not deter us from accepting the reality and not do anything about it.
It also means the change in computing habits; to invest for WiMax recievers and wiring the whole thing to make it work for the populace. It’s about change and till the time we dont realise the gravity of situaton to be in the “dark”, we’d be doomed for the demands of knowledge based economy.
I am seriously hoping for a change in the Government and appointment of someone who realises the importance of free and fair Internet access.
