The coronavirus pandemic has
disrupted lives and processes personally and professionally for people across
the globe. With few signs of the virus relenting and a vaccine still months if
not years away, the world is realising that one needs to learn to live with it
- stay calm and carry on
Interestingly, certain sectors of
the society and the economy seem to have adapted to the restrictions
successfully so far taking the inconveniences in their stride. And lessons
learned in the last few months from such experiments can lay the foundation for
life post covid 19.
One such observation is the way
that the Information Technology industry has reacted to the crisis. The rapid
pace of digitisation, cloudification of data and networks, and ubiquity of the
smart phone have suddenly made IT/ITes
companies to realise that they can still continue going about doing their
business with 90% of their workforce working from home. Companies which
insisted on their employees coming to the office everyday and be present in the
daily stand up meetings have figured out that standups can be conducted via
Webex and Zoom, your availability status on Skype marks your attendance and you
have one less excuse to give for coming late - caught in traffic. In fact some
companies are seeing an increase in productivity - with time lost due to
commute and coffee breaks converted to gains with increased code crunching. So
much so that Google and Facebook have announced that they will let their
employees work from home till early 2021.
With over half the population of
the world already having access to the internet, several other sectors are also
realising that they can conduct their businesses without needing their
employees to be physically present in the place of work. Take schools and universities
for example. Already the courser as and the udemies of the world had signalled
a tectonic shift in the way education was being delivered - covid has rapidly
accelerated the online mode of working. With the webcam acting as the recorder
and the invigilator, teachers are realising that they can continue teaching,
and whats more, teach perhaps with greater efficiency - automating tasks like
checking attendance, evaluating quizzes and recording lessons for replay.
The healthcare sector has been
able to continue with its activities too - with medical professionals being
able to do routine consultation online with the camera doubling up as a torch
to view your throat and tools like the blood pressure monitor and sugar level
test strips aiding the analysis.
With advances in
telecommunications offering high speeds and negligible latency, several other
sectors like finance and banking are realising that life can go on - perhaps
without the human touch but with the same degree of professionalism and quality
of service.
To be sure, there are several
facets of life that cannot operate on purely the online mode. Travel,
hospitality and infrastructure sectors will need to completely overhaul their
operations to manage the disruption - some sectors may fall on the wayside as
well. But for the others, with a strong telecom backbone, stay calm, turn the
WiFi on and carry on seems to be the playbook for the next couple of years.
## India has adopted 4G
(or the 4th Generation technology) which allows downloads of upto 100 Mb/s (mega
bits per second) - this is what is allowing you to watch movies on Netflix on
your mobile, youtube videos, and allowing SW engineers to connect to their
office networks . Speeds of 100 Mbps are good for audio/video streaming and
making conference calls with multiple participants with quite good
quality
But now with the sudden
boom in the usage when everyone is on the net, there will be need to scale up
these networks and also provide even better services. And thats where the next
generation of technology called 5G is coming. 5G commercial networks have just
started rolling out but the pace of the rollout has gathered big momentum in
markets like the US, Korea, Japan and China.
With 5G the bandwidth
speeds are 10x that of 4G (ie speeds of 1 Gigabit/s), and latency as low as 1
millisecond, which means the annoying lags in your whatsapp call, the
irritating jitters/freezes on your favourite netflix videos will be
eliminated
India should get on the
5G wagon as soon as possible
2. Which are the sectors of
the economy that can work digitally?
##Already the IT/ITes sector is working digitally - but
actually there is no limit and almost all sectors can work at least partially
digitally
Sectors like Finance/Banking,
Education, Publishing, Media have already adopted massive digitization.
Healthcare, Entertainment,
Transportation, Government
services can adopt digitization to a significant degree (eg pay bills online,
book your shows and
travel options online,
telemedicine)
3. Some sectors cannot really adapt to a digitised
world...like say tourism, but they have – telemedicine, is one that comes to my
mind. How do you think the legal profession can work in a digital space and what
infrastructure is needed for that? Consider that senior lawyers – given the
intellectual domain that the legal profession is – flourish far better than the
junior / younger generation of legal professions, designing the IT
infrastructure for the legal fraternity will certainly call for thinking out of
the box. The geriatric lot of legal fraternity are very vulnerable to COVID 19
too, so attending the courts is not a reckoning at all. Your comments will be
critical here.
## Legal profession can
greatly benefit from digitisation. Millions of undertrials havent had a hearing
in years because its not possible
to assign a lawyer, schedule
their commute from jail to court, etc. A lot of this delay can be minimised with
video hearings, online hiring of
lawyers, crowdfunding fees for
example - can all be done online
Judges and lawyers can avoid
scheduling conflicts, avoid traffic issues etc through video hearings. Case data
can be digitised
eliminating human errors and
automating routine manual procedures
These are just some thoughts
from a layman. My friend was talking of an app that shows him the status and
details of his case online
4. Tourism – needs onsite presence, but
can IT / ITES render virtual tourism – (ideally for the armchair tourist) so to
say... how can tourism be rendered digital / cloudified? Your comments on
virtual tourism please. Make it short bouncy sentences with a maximum of 12 – 15
words per sentence! With your grip of writing that will be very powerful
messaging.
## of course. Why dont you
take a look at the British Museum in London
5. Will bionics / robotics
replace e commerce delivery? What real life infrastructure improvement is
necessary for this scenario?
## Robotics will become an
essential part of commerce but I see it more as complementing e-commerce
Already companies like Amazon
use robots in a big way for efficient and error free warehousing tasks (sorting,
stacking, weighing etc)
Again, we need power of
technology like 5G which can make communication to robots instantaneous, coupled
with Artificial Intelligence
and Machine Learning software
that can be programmed so that the robots can refer a million of recorded
instances and then respond
to a new instance based on the
closest fit from the memory
6. Please try and get me
official statistics of internet penetration in India... can I get worldwide
stats for internet penetration / efficacy somewhere on say a UN website?
Check out wikipedia for global
data
Here's another site
For india, check out Dept Of
Telecom India - you can down load the report on telecom penetration from
here
Most of the reliable reports
though are paid ones
7.What kind of internet
bandwidth and speeds are necessary for achieving a clouded or digitised economy
so to say?
Like said the present 4G
already offers a lot of good bandwidth and more than 80% of India is on 4G
thanks to the
Reliance Jio effect.
But if we want to go even
further and support even more specialised operations like self driven cars,
robotic high
precision surgery, even more
superior quality of streaming, then we need to go to 5G
8. How far away from this
ideal bandwidth is India in at present?
# 5G is the next big thing -
but it needs significant investments from the operators like Airtel, Vodafone,
Reliance Jio
Now these players have yet to
recover their 4G investments, and the recent SC ruling on the AGR issue has
left
them with huge
liablities running to tens of thousands of crores.
So they do not have the
money to invest.
Also, the 5G spectrum is not
auctioned yet - those license fees also will run into billions of rupees in
investment
Until this issue is settled,
5G will not take off in India and we may need to wait for 3-4 years
Hopefully the Govt realises
the importance of the topic, and steps in with some stimulus for the Telecom
industry
that can catapult India to the
big league in the 21st century
The 20th century was the era
of transportation. I think the 21st century will be the era of High End
Telecommmunication
8. How far away from this ideal bandwidth is India in
at present?
# 5G is the next big thing - but it needs significant
investments from the operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Jio
Now these players have yet to recover their 4G
investments, and the recent SC ruling on the AGR issue has left
them with huge liabilities running to tens of thousands
of crores.
So they do not have the money to invest.
Also, the 5G spectrum is not auctioned yet - those
spectrum license fees also will run into billions of
rupees in investment
Until this issue is settled, 5G will not take off in
India and we may need to wait for 1-2 years
The govt actually had plans for
some trials this year, but we need to see if they will still happen
due to covid
Arun Gopinath, SW industry
professional, works in an MNC. Thoughts and opinions are personal
Interviewed by Malini Shankar, for Digital Discourse Foundation
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