The future of internet

The way mobile apps are being introduced into the market, I don’t think the internet can catch up with it. We have apps to tell us which movie to go, which restaurant to eat, which event to attend, all our pictures and videos are being stored on the cloud, we can control our homes from a mobile, so on and so forth. We are in such an unfortunate situation that we can barely do anything without the internet. Though telcos have been talking about excellent bandwidths and local operators like ACT and Hathway promising 100mbps, end of the day we barely get 1/5th of it. It’s just not possible for them to give these speeds to everyone. So they along with TRAI have come up with something called FAP (Fair Access Policy) more than a decade back. 

Today is a different story all together. The way things are shaping up; even a 100mbps connection would be a limitation. What I fail to understand is that why don’t they build technologies that can multifold instead of just doubling or tripling? 2G to 3G was just 2-3 fold increase in speeds. So is the case going to be with 3G to 4G. By the time people starts moving from 3G to 4G, it would be choked and they will be talking about 5G. I know there are a lot of technical hurdles, regulatory compliances, frequency allocation challenges and many more issues; but that’s precisely why we have stalwarts like Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance, Tata, Birla in this game.

With more and more people talking about smart homes, IOT is becoming popular. Soon the Internet of Things will connect even the simplest device in your home to the internet. According to Cisco, there will be an estimate of 50 billion connected devices in 2020 and some forecasts even reveal higher numbers. This clearly suggests that there will be 3-4 times more internet-connected devices in the near future. Few companies have already designed strategies to solve this problem, while some are riding on the wave.

Interestingly, companies like SigFox is building smaller cellular networks that are designed exclusively for IoT devices.

Though M2M enabled systems are designed to take lower bandwidths for connecting to smart home appliances; it also makes the users to depend more on internet. This only adds to the existing problem but not solve it. That’s precisely why a 2-mbps connectivity is not sufficient, though technically it’s more than enough for our use.

I can only say that while companies try to find solutions, my answer to this is personal discipline. Unless we get into a routine of curbing ourselves to a limited usage of ‘internet’, no amount of technology or modernization can help us.