Tag Archives: BSNL Broadband

Big Idea Contest Winning Entry.

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A little while back, Rajesh Jain had run a “Big Idea for India” contest. He has touched on many issues in his previous posts; there was a lack of serious debate on Broadband. This contest was open to all; I had mailed my entry to Rajesh on his email.
He had received over 150 responses for the same.

Jain announced the winners recently; in which yours truly has also figured (the names are in an random order). The contest was judged by Jain and Atanu Dey (whose blog is linked to in the blog roll in side bar). Of course, he has been a huge influence in shaping up my thought process and I owe a lot to him.

The post, in it’s entirety follows here. For the regular readers, there is nothing new because I have already touched on these issues in the previous posts extensively.

This is one answer and highly underrated option. The following scenario is envisaged:

1) Optic fibres running across to get the data without caps. We need fibre to home instead of outdated copper. Last mile access is contentious; while opening up last mile for private players is contentious, this needs to be debated. Britain has opened it up under strict regulations and British Telecom has been forced to upgrade it’s infrastructure to retain customers.

2) Heavy public investment for scalable architechture. Not 3G guzzling up spectrum but community Wifi’s (pay per use or perhap involving the municipalities making the people accountable directly for the level of involvement).

3) Create an ecosystem of open source applications to harness ideas; make it easier for people to access services. (Open Source standards promote interoperability; closed source is meant for perpetual profiteering at public’s expense).

4) Opening up the Government’s accumulated data through API’s etc; create models around it. For e.g., data from GPS installed in public transport would easily display the estimated arrival time through SMS if needed on the mobile phones. (“Hacker culture” is missing in India; most of the Bangalore flotsam is moronic army of debuggers and script kiddies).

5) Teleconferencing would make it easier for people to people contacts; Gujarat has shown the way! Why can’t India have something similar to Skype? (There is a move to have something similar in the GNU world where encryption would be based on open standards).

6) Education sector would get a boost; not only invite faculty, stream educational videos, hold tele-sessions but teach kids for a wonderful world of Internet. (Pilot experiments in Bihar/Gujarat have been well received; the idea needs scaling up).

7) Spin off benefits from e-commerce applications.

The potential is huge; if you are planning it to share with BJP, the easiest way out is to break the ISP‘s monopoly, hold TRAI responsible for execution (not DoT) and revise Broadband definition to at least 2 Mbps (UNLIMITED, WITHOUT any caps).

Thanks Rajesh!

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Some minor changes

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I have shifted to Firefox beta builds and I must admit that after a long time, there has been a credible worthwhile option in the Open Source. I have always aligned with open source; though I have been using Opera as my default browser. The annoyances come in when one can’t customize the software to one’s taste.

For example, Thunderbird allows one to set up multiple email identities. Opera mail refuses to listen to it’s customers (be it on their news servers or their forums). Although I have to admit that it terms of GUI or innovations, nothing beats it; even though their software sucks.

In any case, Chromium was too overbearing for me in the past few builds; it was refusing to open up, sucking up on the experience. And I have no qualms in admitting the fact that Firefox is indeed the next Chrome; the browser battles have been drawn up clearly and it remains to be see how it finishes off.

Opera would remain at it’s pathetic best unless they open up the API‘s and make it more extensible. At present, because of its poor market share AND lack of “open source”, desktop is sucking up. The problem is that it extends to their entire ecosystem (on mobile phones and other platforms) that is impossible for them to open up the code. Well, thats part of the reason.

I have my annoyances with BSNL broadband off and on… and I am looking at the computational databases with interest. Broadband has a lot of potential; it remains to be seen how we extend our imagination.

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Some more changes here

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On the main page, I have set up a Twitter Widget; I was finding it difficult to load one from the official site. However, WP has tonnes of plug ins which helped me set it up in a jiffy.

Although I experimented with a different theme, but I stuck on the present option. It is much more “feature rich” in my opinion and generally works.

What I have done around this time is to integrate the tags and the posts in a more fundamental manner. It took some tweaking of Simple Tags plug in and Open Calais integration (via their API key), which is the first step towards “semantic web”. The idea is to have a better search (from the tag clouds AND the database) as well as be relevant for the searches. I was keen to get a RSS aggregation enabled on the site but it wasn’t possible to do it effectively. Further, it would have just polluted the pages and the different posts so I gave up the idea.

What I love about the tags (and being able to apply it automatically) is the ability for “deep search” and relevance. Although taxonomy is being deprecated in many blog posts, still it is far better than the keyword searches that search engines rely on. The obvious evolution is semantics and identification of contextual linkages for identification of content (instead of merely categorizing them) and this is first step towards that.

On the sidelines, I have emailed to Business Standard regarding the BSNL update on the RTI application and hoping that there would be some traction on that count. I also hope that they would keep me in the loop and do the needful of bringing about at least some accountability in the sector.