Nirendra Awasthi - Society

ISPs in India

Wed, 17 May 2006 11:06:04 -0700

An Internet service provider (ISP, also called Internet access provider or IAP) is a business or organization that offers users access to the Internet and related services. Many but not all ISPs are telephone companies.

Internet access reached India in the early 90’s. ERNet, a division of Department of Electronics (DoE), and NICNet (Department of Statistics) were the pioneers for providing this service. Both ERNet and NICNet were Government bodies, though had very different charters and growth histories.

The ERNet (Educational and Research Network) project was designed to provide Internet connectivity to the premier educational and research institutions of India, while NICNet was assigned the provision of Internet services primarily to Government departments and organizations. ERNet grew from a low-bandwidth, unreliable, shell1 and UUCP2 based Internet service to become the first to provide full TCP-IP3 access to dial-up modem4 customers through SLIP5 accounts around 1993.

NICNet began with shell-only access, at 2400 BPS, but started providing high speed TCP-IP access through 64 KBPS V-SAT links.

ERNet and NICNet are thus India’s first ISPs, though their operations have been shackled by the restrictions put upon them by Government regulations and policies of the Department of Telecom (DoT). Despite this, they were doing quite well in providing the essential Internet services to an Internet-starved India, until the advent of VSNL Internet services and the restrictive clampdown that followed.

Another provider of Internet services that preceded VSNL is the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) Internet service. This service was permitted only for a restricted audience, the software exporters falling under the STP scheme of the DoE. STPI has been providing high-end Internet services through leased lines and dial-up links, in and around several of the Parks, including Bangalore, Hyderabad and NOIDA, through the respective SoftNET networks.

Entry of VSNL..

On 15th August 1995, VSNL launched the Gateway Internet Access Service, for providing public Internet access. Initially, DoT allowed VSNL the license to operate this service only in the 4 metros. By the VSNL charter, it is supposed to only provide international telecom gateways, not end-user services. Thus the name "Gateway Service" was used to cover up for direct service provision.

Starting with only dial-up shell and PPP8 access in the 4 metros, VSNL followed with leased-line access to subscribers, followed by the setting up of points of presence (POP) in Bangalore and Pune. The DoT has turned a blind eye to these license violations, and tacitly helped VSNL with post-facto ad hoc permissions along the way.

VSNL has, since the inception of GIAS, portrayed itself in the press as India’s only legitimate ISP, while forcing many restrictions on the other ISPs through DoT regulations and the telecom policy. The Telegraph Act of 1885, a pre-independence British law, has been repeatedly invoked by VSNL and interpreted to give itself extended powers while forcing the other ISPs to curtail their operations.

ISP monopoly never ceased to exist even after other players entering Indian market. There have been incidents of individuals facing problems regarding good quality internet connection.
Quoting an incident from Broadband blog:
"Well, to cut a long story short, this person works with a respectable computer company. He wanted to have a connection of his own to work. Since he lives in a place where there is no other service provider, he chose to trust his money in Tata’s brand name. However, despite repeated calls and efforts, he couldn’t trace the “executive” for his
connection. "

These and similar incidents might make one feel to go about opening their own ISPs.

Entanet, a supplier of business-to-business Internet services, has announced sometime back, that it is to offer a 'Virtual Pipe' option that takes advantage of a company's infrastructure. The Virtual Pipe enables ISPs, companies, societies, local authorities, schools, or any organization, to offer its own independently managed service.

Aimed at organizations that envisage connecting upwards of 50 users, customers of the service will have their own set of IP addresses and Radius server and bill their own customers directly, while Entanet manages all of the traffic and infrastructure behind the scenes.

Talking about Indian ISP is going to take time. Meanwhile, would like to hear your experiences about it.

Barcamp Pune

Fri, 05 May 2006 22:58:39 -0700

Foo Camp is an invite-only event for technology luminaries hosted in Sebastopol, CA at the O’Reilly headquarters. Though everyone is not invited in the event.
In response to criticism of Foo Camp, BarCamp was created as an open, welcoming, once-a-year event for geeks to camp out for a couple of days with wifi and smash their brains together.

It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one.

There is going to be a barcamp in Pune shortly. Visit this link to register for the event http://barcamp.org/BarCampPune

I will be there, will you be?

Mobber with online presence launched today

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 04:54:57 -0800

Presence is defined as knowing that a person is online, and on a connected device with a certain device profile. Each part of that definition is critical to fully understanding presence and how it is changing, and will continue to change, the face of business communications.

The most common use of presence today is the status indicator displayed on most instant messaging clients. A more simple everyday example is the 'on-hook' or 'off-hook' state of a telephone receiver, resulting in a distinctive ring tone for caller. Some states that offer extended information on the user's availiability are "free for chat", "away", "do not disturb", and "out to lunch", which are often seen on many modern instant messaging clients.

AOL Instant Messenger, Antepo, Skype, Microsoft Live Communication (LCS) Server, Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing, and other products provide facilities for presence management today. They differ in how they deliver this functionality and the audience for which this function is made available. But they are all similar in that presence is only conveyed to those on the same network.

However, in order to realize the full potential of presence it will have to be relayed in a consistent manner, regardless of the network that the individual may be connected to. Doing this is going to require new products based on standards, and efforts to make that happen are underway now.

There are several groups trying to standardize the presence protocol. XML based XMPP(Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) by Jabber, was approved in 2004 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an industry standard protocol, and is used in private enterprise instant messaging systems. Boeing selected XMPP to provide chat and presence services for the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) initiative.

SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, and is a signaling protocol used to establish sessions in an IP-based network. The SIP protocol is stewarded by the IETF and is being broadly extended and enhanced to support the requirements of secure instant messaging and presence management (SIMPLE) . Another leading standard (OASIS), also called the Liberty Alliance Project has released a specification for a presence management Web service within the context of the Liberty Alliance, a federated identity management solution.

Presence is a much hyped word in instant messaging domain. One of the startling factoid is that 40 percent of business IM use leads to a phone call. This points out that the core value of IM isn't messaging, but presence, that capability integral to IM systems that lets others know if you are online and available.

Will Web 2.0 change the definition of online presence? Noticed Mobber today. It shows you who's on a particular web page, allowing you to chat with them privately or in a group. It's their first day and they are already rocking.

For anyone who wants to chat with me or with anyone else looking at this page, I've added a Mobber bar to the bottom of the site - it's pretty slick. Talk to each other or ping me.

Future of blogging

Wed, 17 May 2006 11:17:14 -0700

According to news.com, a new blog is created every 7.4 seconds. That adds up to 12,000 new blogs a day, 275,000 posts a day and 10,800 updates an hour. Technorati, a search engine that monitors blogs, tracked more than 8 million online diaries as of March 21, 2005, up from 100,000 just two years ago.

Blogging is really catching up. Indian government is also planning to open doors to Indian bloggers.

I was wondering on how future of blogging will look like.

Blog Weblog wrote that Autoblogging will be the wave of future. According to them, some examples of autoblogging could be :
1. autoblogging by email
2. autoblogging via mobile phone
3. autoblogging in a supermarket with a PDA

A new term Moblog is emerging in blogging these days.
Recent interest in wireless blogging seems to revolve around SMS. Essentially this is e-mail blogging from a cellular phone using an SMS to E-mail gateway.
Though, Blogging using PDA is also becoming common. People have started blogging using Camera phones, and there are products to even update a blog using phones.

People are finding Audio blogging as interesting. I recently noticed a site audioblogger which seems to be an extension of Blogger and provides unlimited audio posts. Another site audblog allows bloggers to post audio to their blogs using any phone.

Talking about expressing ideas, Video blogs seems to be the next extension to audio blogging. Vidblog contains a collection of video blogs, and the number seemed fairly surprising to me. Search engine giant Google is also looking towards video blogging, they have already started accepting videos.

There are so many blogs on web that it becomes difficult to keep track of them. RSS, ATOM, RDF, OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) are few of the popular specifications of syndicating and sharing weblogs. OPML is a file format which can be used to share RSS subscriptions. It can be used in RSS aggregators like Bloglines or Akregator to import an OPML file to subscribe to all the feeds.

Lot of Companies are encouraging their employees to blog. Google was probably the first one to create a corporate blog, and now there are others including Microsoft, Macromedia, Yahoo search and Ask Jeeves.

With all these new changes taking place in blogging, it makes me think how it will look like in future. Adding few more points on what Fabrice wrote on this:

Blogging and social networking softwares will converge.

websites will become more blog like.

Corporate blogging will grow. Companies are already finding it as a way for the employees to express their thoughts and concerns.

There will be areas other than technology and politics emerging in blogs.

Based on blogger's interests, new blogging groups will start emerging.

New business models for blogging will emerge. Companies like google, yahoo, msn, bloglines are already working on providing blogging services, and it might take form of something similar to having a premium blogging account with more space and more features with some extra charges.

Social networking websites

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 03:59:13 -0700

Never realised there are so many social networking sites.

http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/sns-meta-list/

World comics India

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:43:01 -0700

Comics are a powerful medium of story telling. They can be used for educating people on current issues and urge one to action.

One such effort is World Comics India(WCI), which is working for using comics for raising issues including environment, women, population, HIV/AIDS, peace and human rights amongst others.

Bumped into this site while googling. Looks like an interesting effort to use comic as a serious form of communication.