Nicholas Negroponte, founding director, Me-dia Lab, MIT, in his book Being Digital had theorized that the information being ex-changed over wires, would in future come through the airwaves and the reverse would also hold true. He reasoned that bandwidth in the wires was infinite but airwaves didn’t give us that luxury. And it was therefore important to conserve it for communicating with objects and beings that moved. It’s time to examine if the Negroponte Switch has been flicked on.

Some estimates say that in as many as 97% of homes in the US, coaxial brings in the television. So in retrospect, we can easily say that Negroponte was right in the crystal ball gazing, for the switch is at work as far as television is concerned in both developing and developed markets, with varying degrees of it having happened.

Dig a little below the surface and one realizes the far-reaching impact of the Negroponte Switch. While we know that computing and communication have converged, it’s just a matter of time that connectivity to the network will be ubiquitous. And this is not what Morpheus had in mind when in the Matrix, he said, "The Matrix is everywhere."

On a brightly lit Tokyo street in the Shibuya district, the one thing that catches the eye, apart from the hustle-bustle of the traffic and the huge neon signs, is the mass of Japanese youth that’s constantly pecking on their next-generation mobile phones. One among them is answering an e-mail from his girlfriend. Cut to another scene: somewhere in the US far away from the Tokyo traffic, a young executive waiting at the Denver airport lounge is vigorously typing into his notebook. This executive

dressed in not-so-formal attire is typing into his notebook, answering e-mail from his boss.

The mobile phone and notebook will drive the new paradigm of computing. This new paradigm of mobile computing will have two actors playing the lead role, both performing different but equally important roles. This is because the word ‘wireless’ connotes different meaning for different people. For some it means the ability to have access to information and services from the Internet on their cellphones, while to others it’s the convenience to surf the Net on their notebooks while on the run. Whatever the meaning, it definitely means one thing: ubiquity of connectivity.

Falling Prices
The last year spelt good news for notebooks in India. First, the year witnessed a growth of nearly 50% over the previous year and the average price point dipped below Rs 1 lakh. It stood at around Rs 85,000. This meant that the notebook was moving beyond the purview of the corporate user, with professionals across smaller towns in the country being aggressively targeted as prospects. And therefore it comes across as no surprise that these falling prices led a huge volume jump (see chart: The Indian Notebook Market).

The Unwiring Forces

Falling Prices The average price of a notebook stood at Rs 85,000 last year and the dip continues, now even faster Fully loaded cellular phones are coming cheaper too! Other associated equipment, like Wi-Fi cards, and Wi-Fi access points, are now much cheaper Better Infrastructure A greater number of telecom players offer better services at lower price points Increased Usage Uptake of services by businesses and end-users has been driven by falling prices and appropriate applications

Vendors too rediscovered the magic of pricing. Every passing day, newspapers and magazines are inundated with offers from vendors about ever lower prices. The magic number for the notebook sellers now is Rs 50,000. Many of them have joined the race to reach it faster and better than the rest. In fact, Acer has been able to break that too by offering a Celeron-based notebook at a sub-50k price point. Other biggies like IBM and HP are not too far behind. HCL’s aggressive distribution of Toshiba notebooks at competitive prices for a diverse set of users also deserves a mention here.

The mobile computing revolution in the country is being acted upon by another positive wind of change—the marked improvement in telecommunication infrastructure. The end user today has a number of options available to connect to the Net. The CDMA service provider is in the race, competing with the fixed-line service provider to help the customer, not to forget the local cablewallah who offers broadband over the cable.

But that still tethers the notebook on to a desk. Will the notebook be really mobile?

And the answer lies in a contraction that has the fancy of the entire world today—Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi promises to break the chains that bind the notebook. And interestingly it has caught the eye of service providers and vendors alike.

It’s not Just Hype
Wi-Fi or 802.11b uses unlicensed radio spectrum to enable computers within a short distance of a few meters to share an 

In India too, the coffee bars and the cafes have been the innovators and hotels and convention centers are now joining the race to go hot

Internet connection. The area covering a few square meters around the base station is what is a hotspot. Base stations are springing up all over the place. Gartner Dataquest estimates that 15 million Wi-Fi adapters for computers and 4.4 million base stations were sold in 2002. While most of these went to private organizations for their local area networks, the activity for public hotspots is also touching a near frenzy. Hotel lobbies, airport lounges, convention centers, universities, coffee bars, and even homes boast of being hot today. In the US, just about 1,000 hotels offered Wi-Fi in 2002, and the number is expected to swell to 25,000 by 2007. IDC also estimates that globally the number of hotspots will touch 85,000 by 2004. A well-known network of hotspots is the one operated by T-Mobile that covers over 2,000 Starbucks coffee bars in the US alone.

Intel also plans to ‘facilitate’ 1,000 hotspots in the country in 2004. Bharti Infotel has also announced Wi-Fi package along with its DSL service for Touchtel users in the states of Delhi, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The service is primarily targeted at the SME and homes, and will enable Internet speeds of up to 128 kbps. The company is looking at taking the Wi-Fi network public in its second phase, after a certain customer base has been established. So it comes as no surprise that Bharti is working very closely with Intel to promote the adoption of newer technologies and develop applications for wireless. And then of course, the government has taken note too. While the 802.11b has been de-licensed for indoor usage, the government is looking at extending it not only for outdoor commercial usage but is also considering to ease restriction for the 802.11a and the 802.11g standards.

However, we need to look at a canvas that goes beyond just Wi-Fi. The bigger picture is wireless.

The Application is King
Wireless has the potential to dramatically change the way businesses interact with not only their customers and suppliers but also the way the business processes are aligned. So can it then be a matter of coincidence that Radio Frequency Identification 

(RFID) is catching the attention of one and many. The Internet has, for the first time, offered the luxury of entering into a dialogue with the customer, though the promise of mass-customization is still unfulfilled. Wireless can help companies access customer information in real real-time. With so many companies already running CRM software, the reduction in information float—the time taken for information to reach the user from the point of collection—will aid better customer service and faster response (see sidebar: Think Business Processes).

According to Prof. Ranjay Gulati of the Kellogg School of Management, "Wireless data is unique in its ability to combine personalization and enrichment to create powerful end-user applications." Personalization goes beyond mass customization and depends on the degree to which the data available is time- and location-sensitive. So simply surfing the Web is just seeking static information that can be customized to a certain extent, based on a few simple parameters. So Web page customizations are not real personalizations. Enrichment, on the other hand, is the degree of relevance of the information to the user, coupled with the level of interactivity. For instance, an auto part salesman armed with a wireless device can access not only his e-mail but also gets a fix on the inventory level of a requested component from the nearest warehouse. This serves as a perfect example of wireless data that is highly personalized and comes with a high degree of enrichment.

The Second Lead Actor
The cellphone of the future will be as power-packed as the PC of today and connectivity to the Internet will be freed from the shackles of the connecting wire (it has already happened to an extent). The global population of mobiles is growing by leaps and bounds. An example to this effect will help amplify the identification of this trend. Sometime around the middle of last year, Taiwan’s transportation and communication ministry announced that the cellphone penetration in the country had crossed the 100% mark. In a country populated by 22.3 million people, it boasted 22.6 million cellular phones. Considering that just over 20% of the Taiwanese population is under the age of 14, a fair number of them have more than a phone each. And the fixed-line penetration stood at 57.7%, indicating that a greater number of Taiwanese had a cellphone. What you see in Taiwan is nothing but the reverberations of a global trend. According to the numbers released by International Telecommunication Union, the global population of cellphones crossed the fixed-line numbers this year (see chart: World Telephone Subscribers). And this’s a trend that’s being echoed in India too.

The Cell in India is Rocking
According to the Cellular Operators’ Association of India, the subscriber base stood at 20.72 million in November 2003, having more than doubled from 9.73 million around the same time last year. Interestingly, the growth rate in cellular penetration in the four metros paled in comparison to the growth that the rest of the country witnessed. The average usage also went up from 200 minutes per month last year to 290 minutes per month in 2003. The domain of the cellular phone is moving beyond just voice; this year also saw a substantial jump in revenues that accrued to service providers from short messaging services (SMS).

According to Mobinet—a biannual study conducted by AT Kearney and Judge Institute of Management, to map the usage of mobile phones—SMS has attained a mass-market usage. This trend is quite clearly reflected in the Indian market too. The last year saw a much larger number of users sending messages, thus sending the SMS contribution to the ARPU up at nearly 4%, as reported by Voice&Data. The next step in this evolutionary process will be to use the cellphone for more than voice and text.

And this is where an Internet-enabled (IE) device makes its entry. IE devices come with WAP, GPRS, i-Mode or any other technology platform that allow it to access Internet-based content and services. According to a report from In-Stat/MDR, IE device shipments will increase from approximately 430 million in 2002 to approximately 760 million in 2006, at a CAGR of 15%.

The growth will be led by mobile handsets, which will sell in much higher volumes than alternative IE devices like PDAs. The worldwide penetration of IE phones today stands at 43%, at an impressive CAGR of 37%. In addition to the ubiquity of IE handsets, drivers like pent-up demand for wireless applications, and the availability of exciting new products features and services will catalyze the demand.

Relooking the Assumptions
Many of us look at the future wearing lenses of the past. When the telephone was replacing the telegraph, a large number of people thought it was just a talking telegraph. Why? Because it used the same wires. But the telephone turned out to be something entirely different. Today, we seem to be looking at the mobile Internet the way we have viewed the fixed-line Internet. While the exact form of the mobile Internet may be difficult to visualize today, service providers will need to create and market compelling services that encourage adoption of new users (see sidebar: Lessons from i-Mode). It will be services that will ultimately decide whether a potential user becomes an actual user. And of course, it’s not a question of whether this boom will come, it’s only a matter of ‘when’.

Mohit Chhabra in New Delhi