Internet Bandwidth: The next big booster of culture and economy?

We might be looking at the prevailing electricity crisis as a big barrier for our development. But technology is likely to throw in harder challenges in future. Technology is the essence to compete in this high-tech world of development, and it's one of our weaknesses. Since early 90's, computer has been playing a major role in making human life easier on this planet. But over the less than two past decades personal computers not took the whole human lifestyle to a new level. It became the medium of socialism and sharing. It took people to digital world.

At the very beginning of human civilization also everyone tried to communicate and exchange experience. This could not be done any better without the Internet. It is without doubt, the platform that is taking over all other media. The Internet has moved far away from traditional emails and chatting. It is currently one of the best communication platforms. The world is now blessed with high quality voice calls, video conferences, digital television through online subscription, Internet radio, online movie service, and digitised music stores, among others. They are, in fact, better alternatives to the actual service. For example, Internet television via subscription can give us better quality or high definition picture, customisation or showing only we want to watch, more control or automatic recoding, parental locks, logs, show scheduling, etc. And more value for money, since Internet platform is much cheaper to publish on. Not only does this give benefits to end users, but this also opens thousands of new possibilities that were previously unfeasible. High speed connection will let the artists and media industry to publish directly on the Internet platform. Most people will not even use the CD they pay for, as they are more comfortable with digital format. With an online store, we could pay selectively for some specific songs, and the pricing could be lower, the company has nothing to lose as they are not making any physical disc or cover that could add to cost. More of our shows, our culture, and our productions can be accessed from people in other countries. The whole industry and business can have new direction and much more effective platform as we move towards the online world. We can have online libraries with paid subscription for students to go and check out those books. With books accessible in digital format, the problem of availability of a book, when someone else is using it will be gone, added with the benefits to perform search in millions of books easily, take references, and most importantly it helps us become environment friendly. Media aside, it improves communication between everyone, everywhere. Farmers checking live market prices for onion or registering with new wholesalers over the Internet, a primary school kid sharing his ideas on new ways to make a kite or sitting with a live class online for distant education, fishermen tracking their shipment and checking live weather conditions from a nearby shared computer. These might seem like a science fiction. But if we don't go and start developing such possibilities, they will always remain distant dreams.

The underlying belief lies in the perception of "exposure". Picture two kids with the same calibre growing up in two different places: one stays in the heart of the city, and another one in a distant village. The way of thinking, the ability to perform in a higher standard, and to maintain image at a more internationally accepted level - all these have the chance in the kid who grows up in the city. Among other factors, the constant exposure to global standards of living changes a person's viewpoint, making the kid a totally different person. Exposure is, of course, two-way. We can also expose our culture to other countries and potential through the World Wide Web. Unless we actually start putting ourselves on the global information highway, we would still remain invisible to the millions of people. With higher bandwidth, we bring global standards to our people, as well as export ours to the outside world at a faster pace.

Another aspect would be to move computing to the "clouds". As technology emerges, more and more software would soon have higher Internet bandwidth requirements than being dependant on the user's hardware. Internet applications are already being developed to take advantage of hardware running at the server end, taking very little resource from client's computer. Processing and storage are being moved to the servers to reduce clients' headache. These will give information its true global shape. Day to day tasks like word processing, presentations, photo editing and sharing, stock updates, and file storage are all in the process of being online applications. Our computers can get cheaper and still have enough power to run such applications as we will be using our machines more like thin-clients. In fact, applications will soon become such adaptable that the same applications that will run in our PCs will also run in our handhelds. For example, speech recognition is extremely CPU intensive tasks, which is more required in cell phones; but most phones could not do this properly because of the lack of horsepower. Microsoft developed their new speech recognition system that takes the data from the mobile and sends it to the servers for processing. With enough power, this job can be done without any stress and sent back with significantly improved results. The concern still lies in the connection that is like a bridge between us and the "clouds".

We have the technology ready, we have the hardware around us, but the path that lies in between is still constricted. With proper planning we could increase our bandwidth at least 100 times more than current rate. IT is one of the places where small nations can catch up fast yet higher speeds will be required to compete with the tempo of development. Any growing economy (e.g. India, China, Singapore, Malaysia) relies heavily on the Internet. Our current Internet bandwidth is by no means adequate. With more chances for our IT graduates as well as creating new possibilities in business to work seamlessly with the Internet, such emerging technologies hold more hope for us than any other media. Given the fact that increasing Internet bandwidth is no rocket science, we can only hope the Government adding more bandwidth and making Internet truly affordable and accessible to the mass.

(The writer is a Training & Implementation Specialist at Therap Services, LLC. He can be reached at saquib.h@gmail.com)