The purpose of the blog is to engage in conversation, learn and hopefully, in the long run, be a medium of change. This is a long shot and the whole effort is stuck in my biases.

Internet has exposed me to a cross culture of influences and revealed things that I never knew existed. Given the huge amount of information online, it is imperative that some form of editing mechanism exists which could bring forth the best for consumption. However, individual differences vary in opinions and attitudes and agreeing to a broad statement of interests is a tall order indeed.

Ever since I started off this blog, it was a concious decision to keep the mandate limited to broadband/emerging technologies and the pathetic Indian telecom scene. We could do without the institutionalised stupidity that often reveals itself in Government notifications which otherwise is a clear reflection of the electorate that elected them in the first case.

With the said purpose of “delivering the humanity and mankind” of their troubled existence from the mental decadency all around, couple of us bandied and started forums called as Think Nest. We really don’t fancy choked bandwidth/ digg effect trying to access, but clearly wish to have an “engaging” content online. A simple sign up and you could naviate around to get the feel of the place.

I hope to see you all there on the alternative platform; a planned IRC channel is on the cards. The discussion can be taken on to the forums from the blog.

You can trust the Congress and their supporting and nurturing babus to come up with hair brained ideas and “sense” that defies logic.

Here is a write up by Sunil Jain from Business Standard, that details the issue. Unfortunately, Business Standard has a lousy interface to access content and I have a nagging suspicion that their back end cannot maintain the database properly. This has resulted in many links going dead from the previous write ups.

I am pestering them to rectify and make amends, instead of wasting good money on a useless host and a web designer.

The write up details the current initiatives for address verification and network monitoring.

South Korea

Two interesting write ups on Business 2.0 and O’ Reilly about the future of Broadband is South Korea.

Business 2.0 writes in: (emphasis mine)

Ninety percent of the country has blazingly fast, 3-megabits-per-second broadband at home, and similarly high-speed wireless connections on the road. The telecom market is fiercely competitive, and broadband service costs the consumer less than $20 a month.

How did this come about? In 1995, the South Korean government made what must rank as one of the most shrewd and far-sighted investments in business history. It spent big on a nationwide high-capacity broadband network that any telecom operator could offer service on, and offered subsidies so that 45 million Koreans could buy cheap PC’s. Cost: a mere $1.5 billion

O’ Reilly is basically a continuation of the Business 2.0 write up:

South Korea has 80% of its population in Seoul and five other cities, so deploy optical fiber rings into each city, And trunk them together to provide high speed digital transport for the chaebol. Once that is done, the rings can sprout new optical fiber tentacles: 1) for cellular telephony, 2)for CATV, and for 3)high speed data communications via xDSL and CATV modems (no World Wide Web in 1990).(source)

One of the most popular homegrown portal is Cyworld. The last time I tried to access it, it was in Korean. Here is a brief introduction to Cyworld and it’s ever popular minihompy from none other than Wikipedia

Members cultivate on- and off-line relationships by forming Ilchon- buddy relationships with each other through a service called “minihompy,” which encompasses a photo gallery, message board, guestbook, and personal bulletin board. A user can link his/her minihompy to another user’s minihompy to form a buddy relationship. It is quite similar with facebook and MySpace in USA. It has been reported that as much as 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s and 25 percent of the total population of South Korea are registered users of Cyworld, and as of September 2005, daily unique visitors are about 20 million.

Why the map of South Korea?

It’s a small country that is one of the most wired nations, moves the automobile and electronics industry of the world (Hyundai and Samsung comes to mind) and has one of the world’s largest concenteration of gamers.

We are stuck in 256k mode, with BSNL pimping the networks and we have nothing in this whole frigging nation worthy of something equivalent to Cyworld.

Just a humbling thought.