Need for greater speed

COMMUNICATION

New York is a great city. It's alive and awake all the time and there is energy and vigour on its streets. Besides, there's Wi-Fi.

Power up your laptop in most New York apartments and you will see the screen light up with at least a dozen strong signals beaming in. Choose an automatic connect and you can start downloading at speeds ranging between 160 kbps to 240 kbps.

With most data access part of inexpensive, load independent packages, obviously, owner of the connection couldn't care.

This is not about WiFi as much as it is about speeds. Five years ago, I remember logging onto the internet in the United States on T1 cables in offices and being thrilled with speeds of 40 to 50 kbps. Or thereabouts. Back home then, dial-up internet speeds stood around 5 to 6 kbps. Oh, that's if you managed to connect.

Six years later, the situation in the US is as I described in the New York apartment. Or for that matter a Starbucks café. And back home, dial-up speeds are only marginally better.

There is broadband, but I would define it more as the availability of constant bandwidth than a real high speed offering. And yes, its not cheap either.

The bottomline is that while parts of the world have leapfrogged in data speeds, back home, we've lagged. Whether its copper, fibre, wireless, TV or Ethernet cable, we are not exactly on the fast lane here.

The reasons are many, including choked gateways. I am not sure though whether we are doing enough to scale up networks and speeds. Maybe the newly-constituted National Internet Exchange of India (www.nixie.org) will help.

Why am I complaining? For the simple reason that an internet user like me who has actively used the medium for a little over a decade now, I have seen only one scale shift "� when I moved from dial-up to broadband (read 5 to 6 kbps to around 30 to 50 kbps). Okay, in some places with some broadband networks you go a little higher.

But that's marginal and not consistent data flow from what I know.

Which brings me to the claims that internet service providers make. Service providers promise blistering speeds on broadband, high speeds on wireless and good speeds elsewhere, like wireline. But most of it is just that, claims. Reliance Infocom's (Tata Indicom says 153 kbps) dedicated wireless access service for laptops for instance claims connect speeds at 144 kbps. But real speeds are admittedly less than a tenth.

The problem is we have an insatiable digital appetite. Our user-habits are changing. Many Indian sites are now video enabled. Audio is almost passé unless podcasted. And in future, the flow of all kinds of material, from education to entertainment will depend on high quality bandwidth.

In towns and cities, youngsters are increasingly indulging in peer to peer, live gaming or other forms of digital interpersonal activity. I know of youngsters who leave lines open all night downloading MP3 songs (hopefully, legal ones) and even movies on high-speed applications.

Technology is helping. Flash animation allows faster video downloads, as do other forms of compression and high speed data transfer technology. But the need is greater. Bell Labs CEO President Jeong Kim told this writer a few months ago that he believed wireline would grow faster than wireless.

"Because people were consuming bandwidth in gigabits as opposed to megabits." Wireless will not support such high-capacity requirements. Either way, our data deliverers need to do some catching up.