President A P J Abdul Kalam today said that to empower the nation, electronic connectivity has to be ensured, and added that bandwidth would be the bridge for prosperity.
Inaugurating the India Telecom 2006 in New Delhi, the president, who shared his thoughts on “Connectivity for Billion People,” congratulated the users of telecom systems for innovative applications and overwhelming enthusiasm to utilize the available infrastructure in the most efficient manner.
Enabling billions to communicate
Stating that 70 per cent of the billion population of the country in six hundred villages live, the president stressed for the need for societal transformation and sustainable development for growth.
“Telecom could contribute significantly to the societal transformation particularly in the rural areas by enabling our people to communicate and reap benefits. Till recently, benefits of telecom revolution touched mainly the cities and towns. Now it is time for the telecom growth to penetrate into the rural sector to democratise access and bring happiness and prosperity, overcoming all geographical barriers,” he said in this regard.
Broadband economy
The president said that India is lagging far behind with very few households being digitally connected, though four of the top ten broadband economies of the world were in Asia.
“It appears that that South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, which now have the distinction of achieving highest broadband household digital connectivity index of 80 to 60 per cent, have excelled and grown faster than the rest of the world because of significant utilization of local languages in the generation of software and content on the internet. Herein there is a significant message,” he said.
“The large-scale utilization of local languages will enable people to create content with ease and authenticity which, when shared, will have a positive effect in the growth of economy through the benefits of telecom revolution and related Internet and multimedia tools. The Indian E-Governance and E-Commerce initiatives should become the drivers for the rural population to seek information in their local language and thus give a push to telecom penetration in the rural areas,” the president said further.
In this context, he pointed out that May 17, which was till now celebrated as World Telecom Day had been renamed as ‘World Information Society day’ due to the importance of telecom in the growth of information technology and people, particularly those who have not yet reaped the benefits of telecom revolution in a befitting manner, and asked the conference organizers of this meet to take a note of this dynamics in the telecom sector as a whole.
Bandwidth as the bridge for prosperity
The president emphasised the need for good bandwidth saying that bandwidth was the bridge for prosperity.
“The world over, in the past few decades research and development has been focusing on increasing the bandwidth carried by copper and fibre optic cables and wireless medium without having to change the old cables and infrastructure. The Copper cables that carried a few kilobits when they were first introduced today can carry megabits of information as a consequence of the digital revolution. The fibre optic cables that carried a few megabits initially today can carry several terabits of information with the introduction of Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). Similar are the trends in wireless communication. Because of this exponential and disruptive growth in the bandwidth, we have reached a stage where bandwidth has become abundant and one can claim that distance has died. The world has not only become flat but has shrunk,” he said.
Calling bandwidth as the demolisher of imbalances and a great leveler in the knowledge society, the president said that making the bandwidth available is like the Government laying the roads.
“Movement of materials through these roads creates wealth in the industrial economy and the government recovers more than the investment on the roads by way taxes and enhanced prosperity of its people. In the modern digital economy driven by knowledge products, bits and bytes traverse the network and create wealth and this will recover the cost of investments in the bandwidth. Thus a singular action of making the bandwidth available to all our people will bridge the perceived divide. The free bandwidth will make an economic sense if we cost the services offered using the bandwidth. We have the fibre infrastructure ready up to block level, last mile wireless technologies are being implemented and the VSAT technologies for the unreachable are in place in the form of EDUSAT and other Satellite services. Hence, we are well on our path to bridge the gap,” he said.
“In case, we are trying to be inclusive, making the bandwidth available on demand in an unhindered way to the rural areas would be the first action required,” he said in a veiled reference to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s call for “growth through inclusivity.”
Convergence in smart devices
Saying that data traffic would soon exceed voice traffic, so much so that voice and data would merge to such an extent that independent reference to voice as a communication mode may not be relevant, the president said: “India and its people should leap frog, jumping to the most efficient, most cost effective and most useful tools and technologies at the earliest opportunity.”
“Today’s cell phone epitomizes the convergence of many applications. For example, the cell phone today can be used as a simple phone for voice, has the storage for address book, it is camera, it can be used for exchanging and viewing video, it can be used to browse the web and download data and email, it is multilingual, it can be sued as an MP3 music player and as a radio and above all it can be used as an authentication mechanism for mobile e-commerce and banking. It can understand speech and record conversations, text and video. This convergent device is becoming smarter by the day and soon would be able to understand even gestures and would present a natural interface to interact almost in a human like fashion,” he elaborated.
The president also spoke of networks becoming smarter, which has made the distinction between various service providers thin. “For example, the cable TV operators offer telephony and Internet services and the Internet service providers are making forays into the world of entertainment,” he said.
Asserting the fact that telecom was no longer the monopoly of the Government and today we see many strong private players present, he said that the IT and Communication Ministry and the TRAI together had taken many steps that would make the telecom and hence the access to information and opportunities in knowledge creation becomes ever-present and equitable touching every one both in rural and urban India.
Kalam said that India should become the first nation to have the fibre to every home and become unwired bypassing the copper and become a society on the move with wireless broadband as the last mile and be the hot spot for development of wireless 4G.
“With these steps, India has the potential to become the fastest growing knowledge society. Telecom, knowledge content and connectivity are the key elements to realize this goal. Connecting a billion people throws up multiple challenges,” he said.
The challenges
The president also deliberated on the challenges in front of the growing telecom sector and also enlisted the measures to be taken in this regard.
“First challenge is of the Infrastructure, and for this country’s vibrancy in manufacture, research and development should be fully used to make India truly self sufficient in telecom. The number of cell phones and access devices, routers, switches and modems that this country would need that too in a continuously replenishable fashion is incentive enough to start a strong manufacturing program in telecom. We should project a goal of 70-30 by which more than 70 per cent of the telecom hardware and software should be manufactured in India by 2010,” he said.
The president said that value-added services provided a great opportunity in telecom is in innovating value added services that run on the telecom infrastructure. “With the inherent strength of the nation in software, this should be easy to do provided we concentrate our energies in this direction. This is also a fertile ground for incubating many small starts up companies and this will be a second silicon valley – just the same way the Internet spurred the revolution, today the wireless and the telecom can stir another. This will be a unique experience of India,” Kalam said.
Societal transformation
“Societal transformation and economic growth are closely interlinked. Information society with innovation as focus, transform into knowledge society. This, in turn gives positive impacts in agricultural society and industrial society,” the president said laying stress on developing a knowledge society where telecom plays an important role. In this context, he said that the education system should be realigned for the future society.
Empowerment through connectivity
“The core of empowerment for prosperity of one billion people is the connectivity and partnership between governmental and multiple institutions in the public and private domains. The fast growing telecom economy and infrastructure have to be the primary contributors towards this,” he said
The president thus called for creation of a Knowledge Grid, health grid, e-Governance Grid, thus leading to a Societal GRID, which will lead to economic integration of the rural and urban population.
Digital divide or digital bridge
The president said that while telecom technologies have revolutionized all aspects of society: industry, business, banking, government, judiciary, defence, education, health, agriculture, they have also introduced certain concerns.
“In the last one and a half centuries of the growth of telecom sector, and the last one century of the growth of wireless technologies, new problems have emerged. Some talk about digital divide and brain drain. We should see the situation positively. Can we convert these problems to digital bridges or digital highways and brain gains? Already some such aspects are visible in the BPOs and even in call centres,” he questioned.
Reaching the unreached
The president called for reaching the unreached and suggested that radio frequency utilization, and added that much more has to be done in the sector.
Ethics in telecom and privacy
“Finally,” president Kalam said, “Another area needing some assessment and debate relates to invasion of privacy. As you all know, telecom technologies are capable of locating the position of the cell phone, its utilization pattern, and the particulars of the contactees, leaving the individual open to avoidable exposure and exploitation by motivated agencies.”
“Ethics for utilization of telecom tools and technologies also need to be evolved so that individual privacy is not intruded upon. Although some restrictions are in place for unsolicited telephone calls, there is a need for more effective control mechanism,” he added.
Quelle/Source: CIOL, 14.12.2006
