The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Ni?o and there will be nasty surprises around the globe.? This was the prediction made prior to the start of the millennium. Yes, the world has since changed, and we?re living in a new world, unimagined back then. In the beginning of the millennium, it would?ve have been considered delusional to say that over 250 billion emails will get sent every day within a decade, but that number today sounds so normal. The one theme that unifies all predictions today is the inevitable expansion of digital connectivity to all of us and across all things we care about.
It took the radio 38 years and the television 13 years to reach 50 million users, a feat which the Internet achieved in just four years. The Internet is considered the biggest discovery after electricity. Remember the six degrees of separation. It refers to the idea that everyone is on an average about six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on the Earth. The Internet has now reduced these degrees of separation.
We are on this inevitable expansion of being connected and the course we are on will beat out the Internet and any other technology experience we have lived through. In aggregate, the impact will dwarf the change, the Internet itself.
So today, when the industry makes predictions like 10 billion connected devices by 2020, one wonders, if it will indeed take that long? Think about this, the devices brought to networks will be beyond PCs and phones. It will literally be anything that can benefit from exchange of information. Five-plus billion people will get connected and the value creation will amount to a trillion of dollars.
But where India is on this journey of inevitable expansion of being connected. Voice connectivity happened in this market, because India played to its strengths of scale, besides deploying world-wide standards of mobile communication. But voice connectivity alone is not sufficient.
With 100 million users on the web, 50 million personal computers installed across business and consumers and another 90 million households that can afford to buy a PC, India is just beginning its journey. As India starts its journey of being ?data? connected, computing and being connected will no longer be restricted to personal computers, it will in fact be screens of varying sizes. There won?t be a single device that meets all of one?s need to compute and get connected. We will be in a multi-device environment and an array of devices across feature phones, smartphones, tablets, desktops, notebooks, Ultrabooks and even televisions will meet this necessity. It is this ?screenification? that will demand the need for anywhere connectivity.
The big challenge ahead of us is to get every Indian connected on ?real? broadband, that is one that offers at least 2 mega bits per second (Mbps). Real broadband connectivity can deliver 2-4 times more economic value compared to voice. Most countries that have taken a lead in building broadband infrastructure that define true broadband connections at speeds of over 10 Mbps. In India, after much debate we are finally moving the dial from 256 Kbps to 2 Mbps.
The wide deployment of a broadband network will benefit every section of society, and will actually disproportionately advantage the sections of society that have been otherwise denied the benefits of information and education. This is the very essence of democratisation of information, driven by the expansion of the Internet and the related device technologies.
Timing is of essence here as more of the worldwide economies are going online and getting connected to real broadband networks. The urgent need of the hour for India is a broadband economy.
The author is director-new platforms business group, Intel South Asia
