The marriage of computers and communication technology has dramatically changed everything. Whether you want to or not. Whether you like it or not. You have to sit up and take notice of the writing on the wall. The media just keeps inundating you with stories on Internet, telecommunications, information super highways and new technology. We are being transported into the future at a dizzying pace. When you begin to feel that you have just about figured out how to use your new mobile phone or what the Internet is, you awake to the realisation that your knowledge is backdated.These revolutionary new technologies affect each and every one of us. And the advances in telecommunications are responsible for all this overdrive. National boundaries are no longer of any consequence. Linux, which is a variation of the popular Unix operating system, was developed by collaboration amongst many people spread over the world. They used the Internet to achieve this close collaboration. India's software exports nearly doubled from 15.35 billion to 25.20 billion last year. Largely due to leased lined provided by VSNL. Another indirect benefit of leased lined is that increasing number of software programmers are finding profitable employment within India instead of needing to migrate.The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did in the middle ages. Personal computers have already altered work habits, but they haven't really changed our lives much yet. When tomorrow's powerful information machines are connected on the highway, people, machines, entertainment, and information services will all be accessible.You will be able to stay in touch with anyone, anywhere, who wants to stay in touch with you; to browse through any thousands of libraries day or night. Your misplaced or stolen camera will send you a message telling you exactly where it is, even if it's in a different city. You'II be able to answer your apartment phone from your office. or answer any mail from your home. Information that today is difficult to retrieve will be easy to find. Telecom infrastructure is vital to realise such a scenario. Information is a vital resource and state-of-art telecommunications are vital to disseminating it.The international telecom market becomes increasingly bullish with every passing year. This is illustrated by a revealing fact: more than a decade ago, around the time the first mobile telephone service was launched, AT&T forecast a cellular phone market of 9,00,000 by the year 2000. Today, more than 300,00,000 million cell phones are already in use in more than 70 countries. While trying to forecast telephone usage in the 90s, the researchers of the 80s made two errors: they failed to factor in the sharp fall in tariff rates and they failed to reckon that with increased global industrial growth there would be a more than corresponding boom in the telecom industry world wide.As a result, according to a study by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the gap between fixed main lines and the total international traffic has begun to narrow. The total volume of international telecommunication traffic, which was 38.4 billion minutes in 1991, jumped to 53.3 billion minutes in 1995. It is anticipated that in 1998 the capacity of fixed main lines will fall short of the demand for growing international telephony traffic.Telephony growth increases at an increasing rate as industry trade and commerce develop. In the mid-eighties annual growth in telephony traffic averaged around two billion minutes. It picked up to two billion minutes in the early nineties. The ITU predicts that in the late nineties the quantum increase over the preceding year will vary from 7 to 9 billion minutes. Even during the worst global recession after World War-II the annual growth in main lines increased from 4.5 to 5.3 per cent.E-Mail: bhavani@bom6.vsnl.net.in.
