Monthly Archives: June 2007

WiMax in India: Misplaced priorties

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This is stupidity compounded by idiocy. Miffed at not getting enough “tax breaks” from the Government, they have not really invested in the kind of infrastructure that was really needed to.

Depsite “millions of broadband hooked subscribers”, the Internet penetration in India remains a measly 0.04%. This has been because of the short sighted policies adopted by the Government. When they realised that it wouldn’t be feasible to service the wireline, ISP’s of all hues are now are crowing about the WiMax as the next best thing to have happened to Indians for Internet access. I see beaming executives go to that “extra” mile to ensure that the word gets hammered about the all pervasive Internet access. And understandably so. They are only concenterating in metros and class A cities. This means that the poor guy getting his fix of porn in Jhumritalliya via dial up Internet would still have to wait for atleast another generation before Broadband reaches him.

This becomes interesting. Much of the energy is being squandered away in setting up parallel networks. Railways has a HUGE optic fibre network and while there was a lot of hue and cry about spinning off a seperate arm to provide a backbone, nothing seems to have come off it. While most of us are still bandwidth starved for online applications. Guys, if speeds of 2 MBps are “fast” enough, imagine what Gigabits speeds would do to your Internet access.

Spectrum issues are difficult to get rid off. It is next to impossible to imagine a situation when Indians would think rationally. It is a “me too” syndrome affecting all the nuts who control your access to Internet. Reliance, VSNL (yeah, those morons too), BSNL (the bastardised sonofabitch of Department of Telecom) and what not are jumping in the fray. I read about BSNL were holding trials in Pune. What came of it?

There are people who claim about selling Wimax “enabled” notebooks to ensure “always on” connectivity. If I am not mistaken, Intel has sunk in millions to create a “standard” for Wireless access and their future stock prices (and hence profits) hinge on the early adoption of this “standard”. I condemn this for all practical purposes. Because, we would be locked in a certain format and the airwaves are a public property. How the F*** they decide to dictate us the laws of the game? In my opinion, the Wireless Access Standards should be based on Open Source (if there is any) so that the public property remains in it’s hands. Since the custodians in the form of Government have already sold off their souls to the Devil incarnate, it makes no sense to petition to them. Yet what the F*** the media watchdogs are doing?

A single company by virtue of it’s dominance should not be allowed to rule the airwaves just the way it is doing. In a way, all these companies would have to pay their “taxes” to the “patent holder” and we would be subsidising their efforts. A sad scene anyway.

In any case, the Wireless Internet sucks. It would be a novelty indeed but ask those people who have been using GPRS enabled handsets to access Internet. With snailish speeds (if the access can be called as a speed), it is akin to two snails “f***ing” away to glory. And trust me, that takes forever and forever!

I hope that better sense prevails and wireline networks get rolled out to challange BSNL’s rat infested networks. This is the least I can expect; anything more would be a disaster!

Opera Mini released

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The fourth beta of Opera Mini has been released.Amazingly, this is just a 90kb download thingy and brings forth desktop like capability on your handsets.

I am no big fan of Wireless Internet and have long held belief that tiny screens make no sense to “surf” because it’s as good as useless trying to focus on something through that. However, given the state of Broadband access, the wireless Internet via mobiles would definitely grow. And it makes sense for the operators to market their data plans effectively.

It is in the Indian context that likes of Opera Mini are enough to generate excitement. There are a huge number of blogs out there who have mentioned about their “wow” experience (not to be confused with Vista). A browser like Opera Mini would ease the pains of “browsing” to a considerable extent as compared to the present generation sucky “browsers”.

For the technical minded, Opera Mini works by pushing your web address to Opera’s servers and it compresses the web page to render it effectively on the mobile screens. There have been concerns about privacy; I feel that most of the accessed web pages are definitely kept as a “back up” for “data mining” or to correlate the preferences. I am not aware of their backend operations but then it’s a matter of trust. You do keep a back up of your email online. Imagine something like Hotmail! Trusting Microsoft?

Apart from the privacy concerns, Opera Mini actually allows to blog, surf, catch up with RSS feeds et al just like your desktop browser. This, in my opinion, is a great thing to happen because it literally opens up a vast range of possibilities. It would make it easier to develop applications like widgets et al and engaging content. Apple’s iPhone was crowing about the “zoom feature” of Safari on their handsets. This, I am told, came in from Opera’s version for Wii.

Internet is all pervasive and atleast in the “developed” part of the world, embedded browsers make sense to access Internet.

I got an email from the Opera team asking me to blog about this once the new version is out. They had specifically requested me to put up the banners online to promote their product. This is in a way a small contribution to the efforts being put in by many others in order to spread the word. indeed, Opera is the only closed source application on my desktop. This does go against my own professed claims of Open Source alone and nothing else. However, the open source “clone” Firefox sucks to the max and it makes no sense to invest my time and energy and to make it work by extensions.

Interestingly, there is no open source alternative to mobile browsers either, as good as Opera.

You could check out Opera Mini simulator in order to check the compatibilty for your web enabled handset. There is an explosion of interest online about this new application. Opera Watch links to various other blog sites around the world.

Further, if you like the application, please do consider spreading the word around.

Further details of the features on Opera Watch.

I must admit that I don’t have a data enabled handset; nevertheless, it might make sense buying one given the exciting application like Opera Mini.

Internet collapse?

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I came across this BBC write up about the impending Internet collapse. It seems that the net may just collapse under it’s own weight; given the amount of traffic it has to “support”.

Some salient “facts” and claims from the write up.

In one day YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails, so it’s clearly very different,” said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems. “The router sits at the end of that very high speed link and decides where each small piece of data has to go. That’s not a difficult computational task, but it has to make millions of decisions a second.

The manufacturer of most of the world’s routers is Cisco. When I pushed them on the subject of router overload, they were understandably confident.

“Routers have come a long way since they started,” said Mr Smith. “The routers we’re talking about now can handle 92 terabits per second.

“We have enough capacity to do that and drive a billion phone calls from those same people who are playing a video game at the same time they’re having a text chat.”

Wow.

Now for the bad news.

The real issue that people are going to face, and are already noticing at home, is that ISPs are starting to cut back on the bandwidth that is available to people in their homes,” said Mr Thompson. They call it bandwidth shaping.

I have been writing in about the next generation broadband earlier on. However, in my opinion, the write up is terribly flawed because it so US/ Euro centric. Yeah, they have the You Tube streaming in, videos being uploaded, porn/spam clogging their email inboxes, compromised networks with bot/zombie puters a plenty and Internet trying to be next best thing after sex (and invention of wheel).

Much of the world remains in the dark. Even if you account for an estimated 40 million net users in my “beloved” motherland, most of them remain active email users or on chat. The Government doesn’t have to take the role of a net nanny or an over indulgent policeman. Unless of course, some zealots try and create a “controversy” on Orkut by setting up “I hate my ex girlfriends’ boyfriend’s underwear” community.

We simply don’t have the means to access the net or drive it to the “levels” that are spoken off. We are besotted with decades old copper which gets chewed off in rat infested BSNL’s telephone exchanges (and measly workers with greasy palms). How and where would you expect this to be switched on to shining fibre streched to your place? It is impossible to assume the same, atleast for the next 5 to 10 years. India is the only country where Wireless Internet would generate an degree of excitement in the media or bandwidth starved folks who would whip up their shiny blackberrys only to check email.

Business World carried out an article on the development of the new portals to dish out content in local languages. In my opinion, the user set has not matured enough to fruitfully employ the search in local languages. If “sex” can generate huge amount of traffic for Google, much of the traffic can be easily handled by those Cisco’s routers. You wouldn’t need rocket science to generate those searches in Hindi for that matter. Mind you. Broadband has not yet touched millions of the net users still and despite stories about “scorching” growth of the industry, I would give or take 5 years before it can touch us in any meaningful manner.

This means that promised Mbps speeds would be on the horizon (for unlimited use at least) but that horizon is still way to far off. Indian ISP’s are smart enough for that “bandwidth shaping”. And I don’t see the collapse of Internet; atleast from India at the moment.