The present essay is propositional in nature and has been derived from my research “Content and Applications for Broadband Networks in India”, undertaken at International Institute of Information Technology, Pune. The research was done using a bottom-up approach, going through the following steps:
1. Observing the city-life for interaction patterns in cities and defining the entities involved.
2. Categorizing different ‘areas of interaction’ or ‘logical streams of information flow’.
3. Mapping the requirements to different technology models prevalent. Studying and extrapolating technology trends to explore feasible technology solutions.

CITYNET: Content and Applications for Broadband Networks in India

In 1999, the second year of my B.E., my friend & I were debating on a potential solution to the traffic problem in India. “Wider roads”, “better traffic management”, “alternative transport systems” etc. were some obvious and clichéd utterances. But then a question arose from no where and changed everything- “what is the actual need for the people to travel?”. Soon it was clear that ‘information interchange’ is the main motive behind most of the local travel, and a city-wide information network which interconnects entities in a city, is the smartest solution for a major part of this problem. We called this network as CITYNET. We soon realized that traffic is not the only problem that this idea solves, there are many more. Also, it is not just about solving problems, but about defining the way of life in future. Since then we have been working on it, especially from the perspective of Indian way of living. This Essay deals with implementation of our idea and it also explains the kind of opportunities available for entrepreneurs in broadband arena.

Introduction

To make the concept of CITYNET clearer, consider its three integral parts:
1. A city wide network infrastructure to provide basic interconnectivity to various entities (eg. households, shops & businesses, banks, educational institutes, hotels-restaurants, Government offices, theatres, etc.)
2. A well managed information base to allow easy access to local information and useful content.
3. A set of software applications to allow people to interact online in a trusted environment (Unlike traditional text/video chatting over instant messengers)

Current trends of growth in broadband infrastructure have ensured that most of the urban citizens will soon have access to high-speed Internet. Basic requirement of inter-connectivity would soon be met thus. Now the objective of CITYNET is to meet the second & third requirements. Hence CITYNET is essentially a web-portal providing locally relevant information, content and applications over Internet. Owing to technology, content & services once created can be served over other platforms like mobile phones as well. You can imagine the potential market size!

Surprisingly no big player has launched such on-line services yet over Broadband-Internet. To realize how big this opportunity is for entrepreneurs, read Comments from TRAI, CII and Bill gates.

About Content, Information & Applications

These three (henceforth referred to as C-I-A) are although quite distinguishable aspects of Internet, their usage is strongly inter-dependent in case of our service CITYNET. This should be clear with an example of education sector where a school student Calvin uses CITYNET to find a good college for himself in the city. We can imagine what kind of C-I-A Calvin would expect from us,
- Content: Some videos telling about various career options.
- Information: Basic information about all the colleges (or career consultants) in the city.
- Application: To allow on-line filling of required forms or video-chat with the college counselor.

Thus we can generalize and say that the USEFULNESS of a network based service is determined by the quality it offers at following stages of a network-based-activity (like admission to a college):

Stage 1: Collecting relevant information.
Stage 2: Communicating with the second party involved.
Stage 3: Completing the formalities.

Thus, if CITYNET allows Calvin to 1)select the best college for himself, 2)video-chat with the college counselor, and 3)do online registration & fee payment, we can say it was completely useful for him.

Amongst the three stages, ‘Collecting relevant information’ is the most challenging for CITYNET to support. Calvin’s case was simple where the database required was that of colleges in the city which need not be updated on daily basis. Let’s consider another example where Mr.Hobbes wants to travel out of city by bus and we have to provide him relevant information. To do so, we can simply collect bus schedules from travel companies in the city and feed them into our database. With this, we can narrow down Mr.Hobbes’s search, on the basis of “source”, “destination”, “date” and “time” of his travel. But things will start getting complicated when we want to include “number of seats”, and “seat preferences” as search options. This will require the search application to communicate in real-time with the reservation systems of the travel companies. But in reality most of these companies in India are still not computerized. CITYNET can break the ice in above situation. If a ‘reservation system application’ is hosted on our servers and travel companies agree to use it remotely, everybody wins:

- Its easy for the travel companies to upgrade. Only a 24x7 Internet connection is required at their branches. No other technical hassles.
- Travelers will get the most useful information.
- CITYNET will get more customers (travel companies and travelers).
- There would be no compatibility issues between search application and reservation system application.

Similar models can be applied to other industries also, like education, hospitality etc.

The Full Spectrum

To cover various aspects of city-life and cater to various kinds of people, we need various combinations of C-I-A which can be grouped into three major categories:

1. Industry specific C-I-A (Travel, Tourism, Entertainment, Education, Medical & health care, Consultancies, Hotels & restaurants etc.).
2. Consumer oriented C-I-A (Home shopping, and Home entertainment).
3. Decentralization oriented applications (which support physical decentralization of an activity).

Business specific C-I-A: This category would allow local level SMEs to provide their business information and services over Internet. There is no media platform except Internet over which businesses can keep their catalogs/brochures/menus, product videos etc. and it remains available to their customers 24x7. Also, customers can directly interact (video conference) with person-in-charge and do things which he/she would do, when physically present in the shop (i.e., bargain, inquire, order etc.).

Consumer oriented C-I-A: The reason why e-shopping didn’t catch up in India is the way Indians do shopping. They want to touch & feel the product before buying or would only prefer a trusted real shop, not a virtual one on Internet. Many people don’t have credit cards, and those who do, are not comfortable using it over Internet. We have proposed a model called ‘smart-shopping’ in which any e-shopping site present on our network will essentially be a virtual extension of a real shop in the city. Now for the buyers who don’t have credit cards, we can have authorized ‘cash collection points’ at many places in the city. Such buyers would be allowed to defer their payment before their transaction could be confirmed. Both, the shop owners and the people hesitating to shop online, will embrace this model. Shop owners will get a new platform for doing business and compete well with purely on-line shopping sites. Skeptical users will get a trustworthy and familiar environment, as they will be aware about the physical location of the seller in the city.

Decentralization oriented applications: These applications would enable businesses in the city to work in a decentralized fashion. We believe that the small & medium enterprises (SME) can benefit the most from it. Instead of a single large establishment in a prominent commercial space, it would be cheaper for them to shift their back-office jobs to non-prominent locations. Their employees may also have to travel less to reach office (or tele-commute) and thus save time and energy. General video chat / video conference / video multicast applications are also included in this category. Many people in the city may use these applications for activities like interviews, demonstrations, formal/informal meetings, guest lectures, etc. For such customers, ‘general purpose studios’ can be clubbed with ‘cash collection points’.

Implementation challenges for entrepreneurs

Assuming that the Internet based service which an entrepreneur plans to bring into the market, is a great one (i.e. the business idea is promising), still there are two things which can really decide the fate of a start-up:

1. A business management model.
2. A technology management model.

These are integral parts of a tech start-up and both of these have to pass the tests of sustainability and scalability. Hence the challenge for entrepreneurs is to plan these aspects very well. It is a well known fact that dot-com bubble had to burst because the companies didn’t read market requirements correctly and came up with faulty and over-ambitious business models. In case of small initiatives (even today) many promising websites disappear pre-maturely because they don’t have a sound technology management model to manage dynamism and growth.

The answer to technology management issue is to adopt a “Content Management System”. There are many such softwares available, both commercially and open-source, which can be customized for specific needs. Such applications can easily handle dynamic content and are highly scalable. However there is no such luxury while developing a business management model.

Implementing CITYNET - Step-wise

Keeping in mind the pit-falls discussed above, we have designed a business model and adopted a ‘content management system’ and plan to roll out our service in stages. This step-wise approach is important for all tech start-ups (from perspective of resources & funds planning) because they bring in new concepts to market and people would take their own time to respond/adapt to new things (remember when skumars.com was launched around year 2000?)

Step-1: To develop web-portal working at the ‘collecting-relevant-information’ stage. CITYNET will have to win people’s trust as a reliable brand for accessing local information. Things will move ahead when local businesses/organizations start using CITYNET as an e-platform to reach out to their clients/customers.

Step-2: To upgrade the usefulness of information already being provided. Mr.Hobbes’s traveling example discussed on pg.2 is completely based on the issues involved in transition from step-1 to step-2. It clearly mentions what kind of support businesses/organizations will require to be able to provide dynamic information in real-time to their customers through our network. Thus step-2 is all about making the ‘collecting-relevant-information’ stage sufficiently useful for people.

Step-3: To integrate applications like video/audio interaction (and various on-line business applications) into the existing structure. So that people can not only obtain relevant local information from CITYNET, they could also interact with concerned entities and complete the process on-line. This would require some infrastructural expansion in the form of ‘cash collection points’, ‘general purpose studios’ etc, (all of which can easily be merged with existing cyber cafes and the resulting entities be called as CITYNET-POINTS).

Considering the above steps along with the kind of services we’ve mentioned under ‘Decentralization oriented applications’, we can imagine who can implement all these. Emergence of third parties which provide content, applications and services over Internet is on the horizon (Citywala Infotech is one such entity). If telecom industry proposals like ‘unbundling of the local loop’ materialize in future, Internet usage will become more affordable, further expanding the market size for CITYNET. CII also recognizes the need for third party content creators. Its comments on the topic are given here.

Conclusion

From the ISPs’ perspective, services like CITYNET can really motivate people to subscribe to Internet services. ISPs may need to provide such services themselves or directly associate with the third party doing so to tackle the competition. The future of cities with such network based services in place will be worth waiting for. These networks will reveal new business models like ‘customized advertising’, ‘virtual premises’ etc. By bringing some order to city-life, they will at least help people to manage their personal lives better.

Supporting Voices from Organizations, Experts and Eminent Personalities

TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India), in its ‘Recommendations on Accelerating Growth of Internet and Broadband Penetration (2004)’, has identified eleven major hurdles preventing growth of internet and broadband services. One of which is “lack of locally relevant content and applications, especially for broadband”. It further adds, “Content and applications constitute the third pillar for the overall growth of internet and broadband, with the first two pillars being infrastructure for access and access device.”

CII (Confederation of Indian industry) also endorses the fact and goes a step further to add, “There are several gaps in the content value chain. The primary areas of concern include non-movie / music content creators, digital factories (to prepare content for use on broadband type of delivery systems) and content aggregators. From a perspective of all investment, new business formation and technical and management skills, there is a need to upgrade the capability of the industry within next 2-3 years.”. Following are the projected investment figures presented by CII for the broadband industry:

	Investments required by 2006 (million US$)	Investments required by 2010 (million US$)
Urban Networks	1100	2100
National/International Bandwidth	150	500
National Content Delivery Networks	100	250
Rural Networks	250	500
Content & Applications	1000	2000
Total	2600	5350

(Source: “India’s Broadband Economy- Vision 2010”, CII)

Mr. Bill Gates (in his recent India visit) commented on ‘The Next Disruptive Technology’ as, “Local applications developed by local community for local use…”.

(Courtesy: Hindustan Times)

Dr. Sam Pitroda (as chairperson, Knowledge Commission of India) shares his vision on India specific portals... “[translation]Today India needs portals on Energy, Environment, Aviation, Economy and all the important issues related to people of India... We are working on a plan to create portals which would act like ‘One-Stop-Shop’ and make available all the information at one place”.

(Courtesy: Dainik Bhaskar)

Mr. Simon Willis (Director, Public Sector, Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco Systems, for Europe, Middle East and Africa) in his essay “Connected Cities” states the advantages of broadband and local applications as, “Network innovation is transforming civic communication with the public, allowing information to flow towards people rather than people needing to go to the information.”

(Courtesy: iQ magazine second quarter 2004)

Ms. Sharon O. Fling (former webmaster of The Walt Disney Company, now an independent consultant) in her article ‘Bringing Brick-and-Mortar Business Online’ states the importance of local portals by saying,

“...The people most likely to visit local portals are ... locals. You can't get much more targeted than that. Many analysts think that local portals are the future of the web, and will eventually turn out to be the most profitable sites of all. The unique content, personalization, and interactivity typically offered by local portals make them the perfect starting place for local consumers. And the next step for local portals may be to offer even more useful content and services: high school and Little League scores, church bulletins, local government services, etc.

When the web makes it easier for people to accomplish day-to-day activities, it will become an integrated part of daily life. If you want to be there when that happens, get thee to thy local portal...pronto.”

(Courtesy: www.localbusinesstoday.com and www.geolocal.com )

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