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Chronicles of the communication age
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Thanks to our former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, private telecom service providers could compete with the public operator Department of Technology
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Today, People spending on Consumer Electronics and Communication equipment has been on the high compared to all other commodities. A decade ago, landline telephone was the only tool for public telecommunication. The telephone call costs were very high and not easily affordable by a common man. Now, Mobile and PCs have become essential commodities for everyone these days and the call charges have become much cheaper. What happened to the telecom revolution over the last few
years? Thanks to India’s prestigious organization, C-DOT and Dr. Sam Pitroda for bringing the STD/ISD automated dial services into Indian Telecom Network that avoided manual operator in a trunk call. Thanks to our former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao who invited liberalization and globalization into the country. This enabled private telecom service providers compete with the public operator DOT to bring about the best services to the end customers.
Internet’s growth
With the advent of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standard in 1990s, Internet has grown exponentially worldwide, to bring about a variety of data services on top of it. You can browse the web, send/receive e-mail, banking online, trading online, reserving railway and flight tickets, paying utility bills and what not? You can do many essential things today over the Internet. How about transmitting media like Voice, Video over the Internet? Well, it is not as simple as the data service like e-mail, which does not require “real-time” attention by the network. Voice and Video transmission require the “real-time” attention by the network while the Internet was originally designed for non real-time data transmission. Bringing voice and simulating the telephone network on the Internet was a major technological challenge. There are various protocols/standards such as Real-Time Protocol (RTP), H.323, MGCP, SIP, Cisco’s proprietary protocol such as Skinny, Quality of Service standards, and few more make VoIP feasible today. With broadband connectivity becoming cheaper everyday and reaching the residences easily, now is the time to bring about complete digitization to the home.
Important milestone
Voice over IP (VoIP) is such an important milestone in the era of converged communications that it has laid the road for other technological convergence such as Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Video over IP, IPTV, Video on Demand (VoD), Mobile TV, etc. While the mobile voice is already digitized, mobile companies have introduced Internet Protocol (IP) that allows data services to transmit digitized voice. For example, a mobile user can run Google talk, Yahoo messenger, Skype, MSN messenger on his mobile to talk, chat with his friend. .
With the technological convergence, you only need a single pipe such as fiber/copper wire or wireless connectivity, and a set-top box to access all the multimedia services like Digital Television, digital Telephony, and the Internet to your home. The infrastructural cost would be lot less compared to what we are paying today for the independent connections. Recent announcement by Reliance and Microsoft to provide Internet Television (IPTV) service is another important milestone in this convergence era. It is certain that rest of the telecom service providers in India will follow the bandwagon of convergence soon. The revolution of technological convergence is just the beginning and does not stop here. It leads to many other important Internet based hi-tech consumer electronic products that can securely be controlled from anywhere over the Internet around the world. Future will see home networking of coordinated multimedia and consumer electronic products. Get ready to welcome more digital revolution!
Skilled professionals
Unfortunately, in India, the awareness among the student community on the telecommunications and technological convergence has been very poor, while the skill requirement by the industry is high. The students/professionals with Electronics & Communications, Computer Science, and Information Technology are very well needed as programmers, testers, administrators, and various other technical roles. While the concepts of Digital communication, Filter Design, Digital Signal Processing, TCP/IP protocol suite, Networking, Voice, Telecom, and Voice over IP are essential commonly for all programmers, testers, administrators, sales, and marketing people. While some of the skills are already covered during their graduation, other skills can be learnt after the college.
Programmers should know network programming using Assembly language, ‘C’, C++, Java (least preferred) languages on any embedded OS. Testers should know the general software testing techniques in addition to learning one of scripting languages such as Shell, Perl, Tcl/Tk. Those who wish to administer VoIP networks should have system administration, Network administration skills prior to manage VoIP networks. There are various large telecom/datacom companies such as Cisco Systems, Motorola, Juniper, Conexant Systems, Panterra networks, Xius have their work focus on the convergence technologies such as VoIP and beyond.
Backed by 200-year telecom history and the promising future of technological convergence, the industry offers students and professionals an exciting career for their entire work life. Reports, however, point out the talent hole in the industry, stressing the need for the professionals to consider their career in telecom, datacom and convergence. MoIP Technologies is an organisation that is addressing the shortage of skilled personnel in this field. Visit www.moiptech.com for more details.
NALIN KUMAR
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Education Plus
Karnataka
Chennai
Coimbatore
Hyderabad
Madurai
Tiruchirapalli
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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