Get Connected

First, the good news. Here's a world where your mobile phone could tell your PC to prepare the next day's schedule, remind the doctor about your evening appointment, order your bedroom curtains to part and the air-conditioner to cool your house, heat the water in the shower, engage your microwave oven to prepare breakfast and turn the TV on for the 7 o'clock News. Do all this while downloading your e-mail, information, stock quotes... off the web and readying yourself for next day's video-conference with the valuable overseas client scheduled at 7.45 in the morning while driving home from office.

A world right at your fingertips. A world that snuggles in your palm.

Science yes, fiction no. Such a world is possible thanks to revolutionary new technologies. Technologies that could blur the line between the geek and the ordinary consumer. Technologies that will change not only the way you work and relax, but also make you look at your life in a completely new light. Technologies that connect you Anytime, Anywhere, or in the middle of Nowhere, with Another or Many Other. Technologies that keep you On-line, Always. Technologies that, in the twilight of the early information age, connect everything to everything else.

And they're fearfully close, too. They could be in India faster than when the cellphone followed pagers.

If you're still looking for the bad news, there ain't any so far. Very soon, many of us in India will queue up to acquire and flaunt the pocket-sized gizmos that will make our lives oh-so-much simpler. Very soon, we will gladly let words like WAP, GPRS, edge, 3G and Bluetooth infiltrate our vocabulary and daily life.

All these techs use the Internet as medium. Says Andrew Lippman, founder and associate director of the mit Media Labs: "Computers and networking brought us programmes, interconnected libraries, a digital community and e-commerce. The Internet is now a dominant infrastructure and all technology naturally gravitates towards it. Gradually, the hardware of life will become online. Consumers will adopt a personalised, connected system - digital first, fully online second."

The essence of today's technology is first, mobility. Then, convergence. It's tailormade for the modern person for whom Peter Cochrane, British Telecom's technology supremo, wrote his 108 Tips for the Time Traveller, every tip/chapter in 600 words, to be read in 15 minutes while waiting for a plane to catch or driving to office or caught in a traffic jam. Remember the time you wanted to speed-sell your shares of a sinking company and were forced to bite off your nails at every red light on your way to office. Or to book two nights in a hotel for an outstation trip while driving to the airport. Or just to watch a movie, listen to a song, perhaps, fix a date in a different time zone! Now, you can.

The second crucial factor is convergence. No more different gadgets for different jobs, the end of the road is one, all-encompassing gizmo that will order your life from your pocket. Your mobile phone is your remote control to the world. A small device fixed at your front door is the complete caretaker of your house, outside and inside.

The Connectors

The simplest of these techs, WAP, or Wireless Application Protocol, is already here. GPRS will arrive by the end of this month, edge and 3G close on its heels. Even Bluetooth, from the world of fantasies, is within smelling distance.

WAP, launched globally in 1999 and in India recently, is hot for the simple reason that it provides a standardised way of linking two of the hottest industries anywhere - the Internet and wireless phones. Telecom giants Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and US software company Phone. com (formerly, Unwired Planet) were the initial partners that teamed up to develop and deploy WAP. These players formed a limited company called WAP Forum Limited to administer the global WAP specification process and get new companies involved in developing the protocol. Today, almost all infotech companies are in its fold.

WAP is an attempt to define the universal standard for how content from the Internet is filtered for mobile communications. Currently, one has to connect the ordinary mobile phone to a laptop and dial from the latter to access the Internet. WAP enables the mobile phone itself to connect to the Internet through the wireless network of the cellular operator. It puts a relatively simple micro-browser into the mobile phone and uses a new interface called Wireless Markup Language (WML) as against the Internet's Hyper-Text Markup Language (html) format to turn a mass-market mobile phone into a network-based smartphone.

WAP is the gateway to a new world of mobile data - web-based interactive information services and applications which include consumer and corporate solutions, like e-mail, corporate data, news, sports and entertainment, TV/movies, travel, culture, medical care, e-commerce transactions and banking services, ticketing, online shopping and checking weather reports, yellow pages and train/flight/bus schedules. Worldwide, there are over 9,000 websites already catering to WAP.

And this is only the beginning. In just six months of WAP's existence, it has become imperative for all infotech companies in the world to have a WAP division. By this time, the protocol has graduated from version 1.0 to version 1.1. Since availability of content is crucial for WAP to succeed in any country, new economy and old economy companies alike are competing with each other to be on WAP. Says Sanjay Sharma, general manager, business development, Ericsson: "The whole idea of accessing WAP is to have localised and relevant content. If you don't have that, what's the use of WAP?"

Rediff.com - which has tied up with Mumbai's cellphone operator Orange - Indiainfo.com and Indya.com are already WAP-enabled. Another start-up, Indiangypsy.com, has gone to the extent of offering navigational facilities like city roadmaps on WAP for the benefit of customers lost on way. Some like Nucleus Software are developing exclusive WAP software for banks and financial institutions. Even Internet service providers are becoming WAP-savvy. Satyam Infoway, for one, is in an advanced stage of setting up a WAP gateway. Yahoo! offers a lot of services on WAP, while Nokia has tie-ups with Amazon.com and AltaVista for WAP services. It even gives a free WAP software toolkit for programmers on the Net.

Right now, the WAP phones could be a touch too costly for subscribers. Their popularity will depend on affordability, which in turn will depend on clever marketing packages and tariff models. Still, they will be a valuable asset for the man on the move. By March 2000, there were 31 WAP devices worldwide. Ericsson's new R320 WAP phone can be had for about Rs 32,000. Other companies also have a similar price line, though all promise to soon launch models under Rs 10,000.

However, WAP has its limitations, mainly in speed and bandwidth. gsm (the cellular telephony standard in India) can transmit data at a speed of only 9.6 kilobits per second (kbps) and a final real speed of only 7 kbps. So, only text and very low-end graphics can be accessed on WAP. Also, the tiny device does not allow a big display screen. Since the time available to surf when one is on the move is limited, content has to be minimal. And WAP services are expensive. Says Pramod Saxena, GM and ED, Motorola: "Who'd like to get one-fifth of the speed of a landline and pay four times for that? That's why WAP has not proliferated. "

WAP's next-generation technology has addressed most of these worries. General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), which works more or less on the basis on which e-mails work, sends text and high-end graphics data as packets at very high speeds. Achievable maximum speed: 171.2 kbps - ten times faster than gsm.

Thanks to its higher speed, GPRS may well be a relatively less costly mobile data service. Set to launch it in India within the next one month is Motorola in collaboration with electronics and white goods giant bpl. GPRS-enabled phones will cost over Rs 30,000 but, unlike WAP, the customer will pay only for the extent of use and no fixed fee.

By facilitating instant connections, GPRS allows users to be "always connected". No dial-up connection is necessary. Why is speed so important? Imagine a situation needing remote credit card authorisation where it would be unacceptable to keep the customer waiting for even 30 extra seconds, and you get the point. Also, only GPRS will allow you to fully enable the Internet applications you are used to on your desktop - from web browsing to chats. Then, there's edge or Enhanced Data rates for Global Evolution, developed by Ericsson, which allows data transmission at speeds of 384 kbps.

The shape of tomorrow

We've also seen the future and it works. Leading the bandwagon that will eventually arrive in India in the next couple of years is the 3rd Generation (3G) phone system. The first-generation (only voice calls) mobile phones have been replaced by the digital phones which added fax, data and messaging services. The 3G tech adds multimedia services to the second-generation phones, allowing video, audio and graphics applications. Over 3G phones, you can watch streaming video or have video telephony. 3G is to basic gsm phones what today's Internet multimedia computers are to the 386s or 486s one used some five years ago.

The idea behind 3G is to have a single network standard instead of the different types adopted in the Americas, Europe and Japan. 3G technology will be available commercially early in 2001 in Japan, later that year in Europe. Finland and the UK have also received 3G licences. These phones will have the highest speed - up to 2 megabits per second (mbps), but only indoors and in stationary mode. With high mobility, the speed drops 144 kbps, only about three times the speed of today's fixed telecom modems.

But the ultimate in communication - when intelligent gadgets can talk to each other - is Bluetooth. It will make science fiction a reality. It will make, for instance, your refrigerator, when low in stock, independently bone up on supplies from the superstore. Named after Harald Bluetooth, the Danish king who unified Denmark and Norway in the 10th century, this is an alliance between mobile communications and mobile computing companies to develop a short-range communications standard through wireless. It will encompass both a standard communications interface and a low-cost computer chip. Simply, it means that if users have several Bluetooth-enabled portable terminals, they can use them with all the advantages of an integrated smartphone.

How far are we ready?

The success of these techs really depends on the services available and how fast the industry is able to provide hardware. And the speed has picked up. While mobile phone manufacturers have always taken the lead in bringing to the people web-enabled phones which work on WAP, GPRS and newer technologies, electronic companies have also jumped onto the bandwagon to provide web-enabled multipurpose devices with competitive prices. Samsung Electronics, one of the first to turn totally digital, launched an entire series of web-enabled products in 3G and Bluetooth in Singapore last November. This suite of hi-tech products includes the watchphone, handheld television phone and the flash memory card which works in just about any gadget.

At bpl, which has a presence in wireless, broadband and Internet, convergence is the key word. Says Rajiv Chandrasekhar, cmd, bpl Telecom Business Group: "Convergence of electronics and computers has been happening for a while now. But what is significant today is that the products are affordable and can move into volume markets."

The initial impact in India will be felt mostly in e-mail access. Globally, 60 per cent of e-mail access is through non-PC devices and 70 per cent of Indian Net users log in for e-mail alone. That's the market for WAP or GPRS phones at one end, and at the other, for a clever personal organiser or set-top boxes at Rs 2,500 to Rs 5,000 - the last gets the Net onto a TV for surfing, though not downloading. Vishnu Dusad, MD, Nucleaus Software, though, is pretty optimistic: "By 2010, there may not be drinking water in many Indian villages, but more farmers will carry mobile phones as volumes will drive prices down."

Unbridled optimism? Not really. Adds Saxena: "We were working on the projection of about 350 million mobile telephone users worldwide by end-1999. It finally exceeded 450 million. Similarly, we were targeting one billion Internet subscriber base by 2005. The date is now 2003 and it may happen even earlier. Even if 60 to 70 per cent wireless and Internet users are common, the latest technologies will happen much before we expect them to." Concurs Sanjeev Sharma, head of marketing, Nokia India: "If the mobile telephone subscriber base grows at this rate, by 2005, more people will get onto the Internet through the mobile phone than the PC."

And devices will conquer all. Says Saxena of Motorola: "The idea is to ultimately have a single device with all the functions so that people carry only that for everything." Lippman agrees: "That's the way to the future. Everything will link up to an 'always there' environment where personal networks, toys, kitchen appliances, cars and clothes will all become nodes of communication." Vic Sussman of the washingtonpost. com, who believes that the web-enabled world is still in the primitive "hand-crank" stage, predicts that in five years' time the present avatars of the computer and Internet will vanish. "We are following the historic path of all technology in which things are getting cheaper, faster, smaller and ultimately invisible. Everyday devices such as camcorders, phones and palm devices will operate on a single Internet protocol and anything that is not web-enabled will fail," prophesies Sussman.

If you're still looking for bad news, here's one. The major problem of the Internet age is privacy. If you want to disappear, keep your phone switched off. Also, a small piece of advice for the 3G phone-user: remember not to take your phone to the loo or bedroom.

HOW WAP WORKS