Living With Fast (and Free) Connectivity

There's free Wi-Fi across Singapore-through 7,500 hubs, a network now being upgraded to 1 Mbps throughout

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

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I'm writing this in Singapore, where I first experienced Wi-Fi. In late 2002, Changi airport started free Wi-Fi, even giving free Wi-Fi PC cards (against the deposit of a passport) for passengers-built-in Wi-Fi didn't happen till two years later.

This little city-state (4.7 million people) has moved ahead since. Right now I'm 'roaming' on M1,even though Airtel's primary arrangement is with investor SingTel, because I found M1's 3.5G a bit faster than SingTel's 3G. And both support my BlackBerry service. All telcos are, of course, on 3G.

3G makes for a very different mobile-phone experience, though I do find that my Nokia E51's battery doesn't last a day with all this data usage. Out here, the new E52 (with a much better battery) is 18k, but true to their all-new any-service-as-long-as-it's-Nokia's-own gameplan, doesn't seem to support BlackBerry connect; so I guess I'll have to move on to a RIM BlackBerry handset, eventually.

Back to Wi-Fi. Singapore would be the only country (albeit one so tiny that South Delhi could swallow it) to have put “nation wide” free Wi-Fi, served through 7,500 hot spots. The Wireless@SG network was rolled out in 2007, and is now completing an upgrade to 1 Mbps throughout. It's meant to stay free till at least 2013. Ads are served, and new location-based services will offer locality-specific information and targeted advertising.

The Wi-Fi network's location information is also freely available to third-party developers who want to create applications for the network. Contrast this with India's telcos, who sit so tight on location information (from the SS7 signaling layer, easily shareable with developers), that the only way to get past that block is to drive around India 'sniffing' at every towers, recording their location and ID-which is what Google did, for its mobile non-GPS location-based service.

Free and fast wireless connectivity is a given in Singapore. Even the little S$100 budget inn I'm in has free Wi-Fi. The good thing is that a few of our airports-notably the new ones, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi-are offering that too. Security concerns are easily addressed through mobile authentication, where you enter your mobile number into the browser, and get the single-user password as an SMS.

We have a long way to go in data connectivity in India.

The USA is worrying about being ranked a low 26 on average consumer broadband speed (just over 5 Mbps). An Asian country, South Korea, tops, with over 20 Mbps average consumer broadband speed; Japan, Sweden and other countries follow. India isn't on that list.

It isn't that we don't have the tech. My Airtel household broadband speed's at 2 Mbps: usable, if nowhere near even the US's speeds. But Airtel doesn't have the reach: BSNL and MTNL do, and their customers' quality of service experience has been so poor that they conclude that all this Internet connectivity “doesn't work”.

India's beating the world on mobile voice penetration. It will touch 500 million mobile users this fiscal year, and just one company-Airtel-has 110 million users. But we're nowhere on broadband, wireless or otherwise. And unless that moves ahead urgently, PC use itself will be low, as it is today, and economic progress will be way lower than it could be.

The author is chief editor at CyberMedia, publisher of 15 specialty titles including PCQuest. You can reach him at pkr@cybermedia.co.in, twitter.com/prasanto.

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