We want a war just like the current mobile tariff one, with operators slashing prices.

We want a war just like the current mobile tariff one, with operators slashing prices.

To anyone and everyone in charge,

Can we please have our 3G and WiMAX now? It’s been a while since that treat was first dangled in front of our faces. We’re waiting and waiting, and while things aren’t as horrible on the connectivity front as they used to be, we’re still spending a lot of time twiddling our thumbs while we wait to join anything approaching the international standard for data access. At least we now have hope that the auction will go ahead in January.

We are the common men and women of the country; the students and the workforce; the consumers of every type and class. We don’t know the intricate details of what’s going on in government and bureaucratic circles or which companies are investing how many crores in anything. We aren’t confronted with regulatory procedures and yes, we’ll concede, there are probably a million hurdles that have to overcome before these spectrum auctions can be held. We’re growing frustrated because we know we’re being left behind—parts of the world are rolling out 40–100 Megabit-per-second mobile connections while we’re still waiting for last night’s YouTube video to buffer.

What we want is for 3G and WiMAX to come out strong enough that they really, really upset the current broadband market. We’ve seen things stagnate for far too long, and now we want a war just like the current mobile tariff one, with operators slashing prices and offering innovating services. We want to have new choices, especially ones that can leapfrog over our last-mile issues and jump right into our home computers or handheld devices.

We want realtime, two-way video chats. We want reliable connectivity in every town and village. We want netbooks in our bags that we can whip out and use anytime, anywhere, with no worry of enormous service bills. We want to stream our TV and movies, game on an international level, cruise through 3D virtual worlds, and use any number of rich social media services—apart from enjoying the benefits of better voice clarity and network capacity.

Who knows what thousands of entrepreneurial Indian software and web developers will be able to come up with once this potential is tapped? We want to find out.