Reversing the trend: wired vs wireless

Wireless communications is less reliable than wired communications: this is what we have known for ages. However, this does not seem to be case at least in Bangalore, India. I was having a wired communication at home from Tata Indicom. I used to file 1-2 complaints per week for lack of Internet connectivity and some of the complaints used to be not taken care of for several days (even for 2 weeks). I was getting very frustrated and then decided to take the risk with WiMAX. Believe it or not, I have no loss of Internet connectivity for six consecutive weeks. That is amazing, given the performance I was getting.

Why wired was not working:

1. Copper is expensive and I guess, the metal market is soaring. So, copper wires were getting stolen and sold in the market. Wire cut was the most common phenomenon. There was even a suggestion, that fiber might be cheaper to maintain because the thieves have not yet figured out a way to steal fiber.
2. The trees snap the wires frequently. If the service provider does not have the permission to dig for deploying connections, the wires are all hanging from tree tops and you can have outages easily.
3. Adapters at intermediate points are getting stolen and junction boxes for multiple customers are placed in varied locations at the mercy of house owners.

Why WiMAX is working:

1. Subscriber antenna directly gets the signal from the base station and all the problems in maintaining the wires are gone. Less maintenance cost and i am not sure of the CAPEX numbers.

Challenge in the days to come:

1. Now we are at 256-384 kbps bandwidth range. When the requirement becomes high, it would be interesting to see whether wired connections are again required. Meanwhile, WiMAX seems to be good. I cannot watch a video streaming well, at least I am always connected when I do not have power at home.

In theory, wired is better than wireless, but in practice, the reverse is true in India.

Getting the big picture

Lots are happening in the technology space and this is because how people are currently using Internet to interact, socialize and share content. It is amazing to see how user behavior has opened up numerous opportunities to make business and do research. Last year (2007) I was at a conference, Communities and Technologies at MSU, to organize a workshop http://ebusiness.tc.msu.edu/cct2007/page4g.html on SMEs. The conference was an eye-opener for me. It was a first experience for me to be in a conference, where I do not just meet computer scientists but researchers and practitioners from various domains like social sciences, information science, management studies, ethnography etc, etc. There, I was amazed to find out about two main things: (1) how Internet is being used as a warehouse of information, or as a platform to interact and (2) how ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) is being used as a tool to connect the world, to uplift the lives of the under-privileged communities or to help the small businesses make money, i.e., to make a better living. Attending the various presentations, subsequently going over different articles, helped me to see the big picture: the common users are extremely powerful and they can do many things; they set directions in how technologies move; companies get new avenues to make money or researchers find new problems to solve. Technology (ICT) is a great enabler to help the users and in turn, users use and then find new ways to use the technology, which the technologists themselves might not have envisaged. This was my inspiration for me to look beyond research problems and take a holistic view of the technological world and see where new opportunities lie.