Inadvertently maverick Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla had solved India’s low broadband Internet penetration puzzle over a century ago in 1893 in Chicago when he lit up a few phosphorescent lamps wirelessly. Since this astounding achievement came in the backdrop of his constant skirmishes with the legendary and intensely acrimonious Thomas Alva Edison to prove the superiority of Alternating Current (AC) over Direct Current (DC), it was naturally overshadowed.
To shamelessly paraphrase the dead Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, it was 19th century’s mother of all scientific battles. The spillover of the battle lasted well into the first half of the 20th century. It was a no-holds barred fight between a system architected by proprietary technology, standards and premium royalties and an alternative eco-system composed of open technology platforms, standards and negligible royalty fees. Erase the history and one could be forgiven for thinking that we are talking about 21st century’s all-out war between open source technology and standards and its proprietary avatars.
But then history does have its place when context is all that matters. In the latter part of 1880s, frustrated by Edison’s constant sniping in the ’War of Currents’ and obsessed by problems of long distance transmission Tesla embarked on an ambitious project to find out whether electricity can be transmitted without wires. Using a beefed up Hertz-wave wireless transmitter Tesla lit phosphorescent lamps in Chicago in 1893. That was quite literally the tipping point.
Lesser known, but just a year later in 1894 Jagdish Chandra Bose wirelessly ignited gunpowder and even tinkled a bell using electromagnetic waves. By 1896 Tesla had demonstrated the technical feasibility and the business logic of long distance wireless transmission by transmitting electricity over 48 kilometres.
By the time Tesla’s pet Wardenclyffe Tower -- better known as Tesla Tower -- meant for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony, broadcasting and transmission of power was wound up in 1917 due to lack of funds the relative efficiency and business logic of wireless transmission technology was well established. The telecommunications industry took to wireless transmission technology like fish to water, while the power and electricity industry treated it with suspicious and lethargy. And there in lies a cautionary tale with implications for an emerging India.
Let’s jump to India of today and click a few quick snapshots and string them together. The story plays out like a gripping graphic novel; probably the only way the myriad twists and turns of India’s telecom and digital revolution can be adequately captured
Snapshot One: The National Broadband Policy of 2004 set up a target of 20 million broadband connections by the end of 2010. Keeping quibbles about the target aside, the disheartening story is that we have woefully fallen short of the target achieving just 11.87 million connections till March 2011. Also to keep things simple, I am not getting into the debate of what constitutes a broadband connection. The current definition of broadband is still 256 kbit/s despite a pending TRAI recommendation of raising this limit to 512 kbit/s. Of course 512 kbits/s is nowhere near the globally accepted definition of a broadband connection. But an undeterred TRAI in its 2010 consultation paper on National Broadband Policy has earmarked new signposts, but is diplomatically calling them ’Desirable Targets’. It aims to light up 100 million broadband connections covering 250 million households by 2014. That is still only about 40% of all Indian households. The current household penetration level is a just a shade over 5%.
Snapshot Two: India’s teledensity is an impressive 70.89% as of March 2011. It’s simply mind-boggling considering that in 1999, just over 10 years back, the teledensity was an embarrassing 2.34%. But this stupendous growth hides a sad story. India got its first telephone connection in 1881 and it took nearly a century to reach a teledensity of 1%. In the currently robust 70% plus teledensity the proportion of wire-line connections is a miniscule 2.91%. In fact the wire-line subscriber base declined from 34.87 million in February 2011 to 34.73 million at the end of March 2011. It’s fascinating to watch the average Indian consumer moving away from forms of wire-line communication and data transfer and exchange and adopting wireless forms.
Snapshot Three: Then there’s the narrative of electricity’s journey in India, which makes for a fascinating sub-plot of missed opportunities, much like the greater part of the Indian telecommunications story. In 1902 Kolar Town, famous for its gold mines, become one of the first Asian cities to be electrified. In fact electrification in India started in the last decade of the 19th century with several localities in Madras Presidency (1894) and Calcutta Presidency (1898-99) being lit up on an experimental basis. Just like telephony, India’s century plus drive toward electrification has at best yielded a mixed bag. Though India ranks fifth in the world in terms of total installed power generation capacity, it still languishes at the bottom of the pyramid with one of the lowest per capita consumption of power. More than 18% of villages and 45% of total households in India still do not have access to power. Just as the definition of broadband and its actual speed provides enough cause for a lasting heartburn, the twin problems of quality of power and its duration are this story’s bugbears.
The by now standard and a rather simplistic explanation for low broadband penetration, dismal wire-line teledensity and an erratic power network has been the stifling license permit raj that existed in India till about two decades ago. But does this single point explanation adequately answer all dimensions? What do these three quick snapshots actually tell us? What are the overarching threads that weave through all the narratives?
First, India has shown a remarkable and consistent tendency to adopt technologies -- including associated hardware, software and services -- that do not require capital intensive physical infrastructure. Stark examples are mobile telephony networks and the burgeoning MVAS eco-system around it and the proliferation of Cable and Satellite (C&S) television into Indian households. This adoption is not only at the consumer-end of the spectrum, but more importantly at the business-end too as companies populating this unique eco-system are able to scale up their operations quickly, achieve economies of scale, provide consumer friendly price points and still make a tidy profit. They are also able to break conventional barriers of technology, geographical isolation, language and literacy and reach homes that otherwise would have been off the grid. This potential for wireless transmission and communication was something that Tesla recognised way back in 1893. However, in parallel, India has also shown a stubborn tendency to mess up economies of scale, milestones and price points with any technological framework requiring a backbone of capital intensive physical infrastructure. Prominent examples gone wrong are the efforts at expanding the base of the power sector and current efforts at broadband penetration using physical wires and fibre-optic cable networks.
Second, policy interventions and suggestions made by bodies and institutions set up by the government, especially with regard to broadband internet, no matter how meaning, have not been able to crack the penetration puzzle. This is partly due to the very composition of the committees tasked with solving the puzzle and partly to the self-imposed narrow-casting - uncharitable critics call it arrogance - of the vision which sees the government and select academic institutions as the only bodies capable of laying the necessary physical and regulatory framework for broadband internet. Such committees and task forces are doing India a great disservice by systematically keeping out companies, institutions and individuals who are innovating constantly in the ever-changing cauldron of digital technologies, content systems and delivery mechanisms.
A simple case in point is the IT task forces constituted by various governments of the day, which have the usual suspects from IITs, TIFR and IISc - academicians with scarcely any exposure to the real world of dynamic business plans and changing data consumption patterns - bureaucrats interested in ’privacy issues’ - an euphemism for greater control - and civil society representatives interested in ’democratisation’ of the internet. The chairman of such committees, usually, will be someone close to the powers that be rather than someone with an understanding of the rapidly evolving digital eco-system.
Such well meaning but short-sighted IT task forces have typically recommended the laying down of fibre-optic cable pipes all across the country with different objectives, from connecting select institutions of higher learning to all the Gram Panchayats in the country. The rationale given for such exercises vary from video-based e-learning to solving critical and fundamental issues of core science. Sam Pitroda is already spearheading a project to lay down a fibre-optic cable network estimated to cost over Rs15,000 crores aimed at connecting all the Gram Panchayats, facilitating video-based e-learning and for implementing e-governance initiatives among several other things. This massive project will be funded out of the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), which is a nodal fund collected from all telecom service providers who are charged at 5% of the Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR).
On the face of it, it seems like a noble initiative aimed at an inclusive broadband policy. But it hides two critical facts. First, there is a dense fibre-optic cable network already available in India laid out by a couple of private telecom operators. A large portion of this network is unlit and there are well defined rules and regulations which could allow the government to use this unlit network for social purposes. Second, there are several open standard and open source video encoding technologies, including video players, which have compressed the average size of a high-definition video to less than 100KB, which is the size of a no-frills webpage. The argument that a physical fibre-optic cable network is necessary for a country-wide e-learning revolution and implementation of e-governance initiatives is not only obsolete but patently false in a day and age where secure e-banking transaction technologies are widely used by a plethora of wireless devices.
So what is the way forward? How can India replicate its mobile revolution in the sphere of broadband internet? There are three simultaneous paths that India will have to tread resolutely.
1. There has to be a deep-rooted recognition that the way to make Broadband Internet a fundamental right is to provide it wirelessly. A first step has already been taken by the recent auction of the Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) licenses. There is a need to allocate additional spectrum for rolling out BWA services in 2.3 GHz, 2.5GHz, 700 MHz and 3.3-3.4GHz bands. In tandem. to stimulate the broadband eco-system taxes and duties must be reduced or abolished on broadband enabled devices, PDAs, MIDs, laptops, net-tops and netbooks and there should be a ’technology and service neutral’ approach to spectrum management.
2. The current 3G/4G technologies of Long-term Evolution (LTE) and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WIMAX) which will provide wireless broadband Internet at 75-100 mbps are proprietary and will require companies and institutions using them to pay royalty and license fees. The government should be utilising the USOF to evolve 3G/4G technologies that are open standard, adaptable by all Indian companies and allow interoperability.
3. Break the comfortable nexus that has developed between the institutions of the State, specific academic institutions, academicians and bureaucrats that has created a bubble removed from reality. There is an urgent need to inject fresh blood and thinking at the institutional level and it can only be done by involving younger stakeholders and all the players from the marketplace.
Every single Indian can have a broadband connection with speeds of 100 mbps and above. There is no complicated rocket science required for this. All that is needed is for the policy mandarins to remove their blinkers and blindfolds, jettison their vested interests and learn from history. And when that happens do spare a thought for Nikola Tesla.
R. Swaminathan is a National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) Fellow.
Courtesy: Governance Now
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