POTS of promises to keep

COMMUNICATION

A junction box -- the kind used by the plain old telephone companies (POTS) -- hangs on a wall near the main foyer of my parents' small apartment complex in north Bangalore. It found its way there two years ago.

Whenever I visit the Bangalore apartment, I look up at the box to see if there are any new wires sprouting out..or going in. I was there two weeks ago. No change. But my junction box gazing has a reason. This box, as I understood it, was supposed to be the emanation (or termination if you like) of the great Indian convergence dream.

This was the point where data, voice, video and what not charged through a single fibre optic cable (or copper) into your homes, at blistering speeds. That was the promise. Nothing like that has happened, as yet. What is my problem ? It's like this. The box is symptomatic of many of the telecom infrastructure technology promises that one has heard of. And is yet to truly experience.

Early last year, I lunched with a scientist working with the R&D wing of an American telecom giant. We were discussing bandwidth, spectrum and the rest of it, particularly in the context of mobile telephony. The sense I got from him was that we were on the brink of a major revolution.

Mobile telephony, he said, would leap beyond the bandwidth restricted environment it operated in. Forget the measly data transfer speeds on your mobile, he said, we are now talking about data transfer speeds of 1 or 2 MB per second. Wirelessly.

Wow ! I couldn't believe it. I told him as much. He then explained in careful technical detail how it was all out there already. I began to believe him.

Then I forgot about it. I remembered his high speed promise recently when I was trying to use my mobile to dial up an internet connection. Not that I expected dramatic change but guess what, guess what, this is precisely where things stood two years ago. Or is it three?

So what happened to all that promise ? I don't know. I am not saying the scientist was trying to pull a fast one. He was not. But somewhere between laboratory runs and real life, there is a yawning gap. One that is yet to be filled, so to speak. Largely in India but to some extent even elsewhere in the world.

There are trial runs happening for video on telephone cable and IPTV. I have seen some of this stuff work and it's really cool. You feel truly empowered as you switch from movies to songs to subtitles in a regional Indian language and to a computer screen.

But the demo I sat through was two years ago. For some reason this is not reality. This is the stuff that was supposed to stream through that box that sits silently in Bangalore.

To conclude, I am not saying no advances in telecom technology have happened -- I am limiting myself to the examples and domains mentioned above. Of course, they have. It's just that the promise seems way too ahead. Is it because of over-expectant consumers (like me)? Or edgy telecom and IT companies? I don't know. My worry is that the dream sometimes masks the reality.

Which is that we have not really moved from where we reached a couple of years ago. And we are not working hard enough on building on the reality first. Like doubling existing data speeds on the mobile. Then, let's talk 3G or whatever! My cellular phone is 3G video-enabled. It's new and shiny and the rest of it. For some reason, it reminds me of that box in Bangalore.