WAP: WIRELESS SOCIETY: Our Chance is Now!

For
a nation, which got initiated to mobile telephony just about
four years back, is it too early to talk about a wireless
society? The pessimist will call it crazy, while the realistic
observer may call it too optimistic. But then, things change
very fast these days. Technologies have shown that they can
change entire economies. Especially, two hottest technologies–wireless
communications and the Internet.

Cell Phone
Catches up

Internet
usage has grown tremendously after the government privatized it
in late 1998. According to Internet Service Providers
Association of India (ISPAI), the Indian Internet subscriber
base at present is about 1.1 million and it is the fastest
growing industry today.

But what about the
cellular industry, which is still thick in the licence muddle?
Just have a look at the current figures emerging from the
Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI). An estimated two
million mobile subscribers growing currently at about a lakh per
month are impressive figures given the difficult financial and
operational constraints undergone by the operators. This speed
of growth is now almost as good as the number of PCs being sold
in the country. And there! One can hear the optimistic Indian
mobile operator honcho saying, "The day is not far when a
mobile phone will be more common than the PC in India."
Today, the PC just cannot compete with the economy and mobility
that a mobile phone offers.

But does not the PC have
much more power, storage space, and functionalities! Not
anymore! New technologies have leveled up the two a little bit.
Smarter chips designed for small devices like the phone have
increased the processing and storing power of the cell phone. A
new protocol, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), has done
wonders by introducing a new facet–Internet access–to the
world of mobile telephony. New communication technologies like
General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) and Universal Mobile
Telephone Services (UMTS) will further boost up the
functionality of the mobile phone by enabling seamless and
faster communication of pictures, data, and video. Added to
this, the SIM card is likely to become the smart "mobile
money" when mobile fund transfers happen through smart card
technologies.

A major revolution is
raging across the world today. The Wireless Internet is being
talked of as the new Internet. And WAP is now regarded as the
next step in the value-chain of the development of Internet. The
WAP forum, which initially began with four members a few
years  back, now has as many as 200 members including all
the big names of the telephony, IT, electronics, and content
industries.

It Is Happening Everywhere

It Is
Happening Everywhere

There
is an ongoing rush to enable wireless access to Internet content
in the major economic hubs of the world. Japan led the way about
a year back. NTT DoCoMo’s iMode service pioneered the wireless
data revolution. This country, where IDC projects 41 million
mobile wireless Internet subscribers by 2003 as compared to 63
million wireline Internet users, is likely to be the first
wireless society in the world. Europe is also moving fast. The
Nordic countries have the highest mobile penetrations in the
world. Kids there are known to live on the mobile. Mobile
Internet is seen as the revolution, which could swing the
Internet pendulum from the US towards Europe. European countries
are involved in a frenzied deployment of wireless data
technologies. The Americas, though found slumbering for once on
the wireless data front, are now moving in fast to gain the lost
momentum. IT giants like Microsoft, IBM, HP, Intel, Sun, and
Oracle all see major stakes to be gained on this front. And
telco wireless operator Sprint is in the process of
leading this charge with a national wireless Internet rollout.

China, our own neighbour,
is seen as the market of the future. Already having about 50
million mobile phone subscribers, this country is adding 2
million mobile users per month. IDC projects that by 2003, China
will have 400 million users, the largest subscriber base in the
world. Out of these 400 million, almost 100 million would be
using mobile Internet.

What about
India?

So,
where do these changes leave us? Can we dream big and achieve
big? Though the wireline phone system in India has been there
for more than a century, not much technology advancements were
achieved till communications got deregulated about five years
back. Indians then came face to face for the first time with new
communications technologies like cellular telephony, paging,
radio trunking, e-mail, Internet, and so on. India thus became a
huge land of opportunity and got a big chance to leapfrog. India
does not have much to boast about in terms of telephone network
and usage. But it does not have to worry about legacy networks
or technologies when it comes to introducing new communication
services.

The government goofed up

The government goofed
up several times in the process of deregulation: 

issuing costly licences,
delaying the creation of a regulator, operating draconian
interconnection rules, dragging the issue of corporatization of
DoT, and so on. Even today when the world is undergoing sea
change in how governments tackle communications and Internet
issues, the Indian government is naïve enough to still continue
with its policy of making its future wealth creators (private
companies) bear the burden of licence fees and monopolistic
regulations over their operations. One simply cannot talk of a
digital world where top executives of telecom service operators
have to spend more than 80 percent of their time tackling the
government. Good bye wireless society, if the present mindset of
our government continues.

However, the top echelons
of the government do understand the urgent need of a much more
available and reliable communications infrastructure. As the
wireline networks get revamped, the government needs to push the
wireless and multimedia industries by promoting technologies
such as WAP.

On the technology and
market side, the future looks more positive. Indians have good
software skills, and these inherent talent can be used in the
wireless Internet scenario as well, apart from the IT scene.
Indian start-ups are actually developing wireless solutions that
are being implemented globally. It may sound pompous, but it
will not be a surprise if one finds "made in India"
solutions running the value-added services, of say, Vodafone,
Deutsche Telekom, or RadioLinja. The government made a smart
decision to choose GSM as the technology for mobile cellular
services. The mobile operators of India have put up GSM networks
in almost every part of the country, save a few remote states.
And now, with technology advancements in cellular telephony
happening mostly around GSM, Indian operators are in a better
position when it comes to migrating to future technologies.

The market for wireless
Internet services is small now. But it is growing rapidly. It
could be right to say that the majority of the mobile
subscribers are from the metros and high-income group of our
society. But this trend is now changing as mobile telephony
makes inroads into lower strata of society and the "B"
class cities. On the other hand, it is feared that the fast
growth of Internet usage might be curbed by our low PC
penetration. Here the mobile phone could become the alternate
device for Internet access, thus pushing up the usage of
Internet.