Usage of the Internet has surpassed most predictions - both in terms of amount of usage and type of usage. And now with the privitization here in India, we are all set to experience the circle of woo! The ISPs are out to woo you and me, the hardware suppliers are out to woo the ISPs and the techies with the value addition skills are out to woo everybody!

Let me touch upon some of the issues that will see the light of day in the near future. Depending on your viewing lens (end user, ISP, vale-adder, etc.) you may aggree (or disagree :-)) with me.

Issues that affect everyone concerned (and are the most obvious) include: pricing, disk space, online response, customer service, security, roaming access, etc.

Price is the most obvious starting point - but as time passes, I think pricing will settle down into more or less comparable slots and then what will matter while choosing an ISP will be the overall quality of service.

As an end-user before making choosing your ISP indulge in a little bit of thought. Why do you wnat an Internet connection? What uses do you plan to use the Net for? Think carefully, because almost certainly you will end up using the Net for more than what you initially anticipated. (This thought will also be helpful when you are deciding on your hardware!)

One piece of advice. I would absolutely urge you to explore the quality of the telephonic connection you plan to use for connecting to your ISP. While there was only VSNL, there was no choice. But now it would be good to verify that you can get rock-solid connections when you dial-out. Believe you me, nothing is more frustrating than being able to connect to your ISP and then have the line drop every few minutes.

Having ascertained that the line connection is good, you need to choose an ISP who maintains a healthy modem to user ratio. Because the second most frustrating experience for a user is to constantly experience an engaged tone (although to be entirely fair here, that could also be a telephone exchnage problem)

The new players on the ISP field would do well to learn from VSNL’s mistakes. And VSNL would do well to adopt the service strategies of the private players. Especially as far as customer convenience goes. Being a little more customer friendly would probably go a long way in retaining customers and keeping them happy! And cutting out long, inconvenient registration/renewal procedures would be great.

Of course an ISP would do well to remember that a convenient, friendly service is a wonderful start - but that needs to be backed by a solid operation. Here is where technical savviness becomes important. You may have the most powerful machines and the biggest pipes out onto the Internet, but if you don’t know how to use them, then its just too bad…

The third set of entities for whom privitisation smells sweet are those organizations & professionals who provide Web Services and those who provide Networking & Communication consultancy. My heart grows warm while saying this, since this is the category that I fall in :-)

The reasoning for the happiness of members in this category is simple. With the increased Internet awareness that the ISPs are bound to generate, the potential market of people for Internet Services obviously increases. Starting from basic websites (for a simple online presence), through sophisticated interactive corporate sites all the way upto e-commerce enabled sites. Of course one would need the cooperation of the credit card companies, banks, etc. for this start off in a standard fashion in India.

But meanwhile one can still add a LOT of value to the available Internet access. Irrespective of which ISP one is going through.

But we don’t have to wait for all of that to happen. There are things that one can do right now. Take good old e-mail for instance. E-mail is the killer app of the Internt. It is unrivalled as a means of efficeint, speedy and convenient communication. And organizations have realized that it can offer substanial savings as
well as increase productivity.

To be really useful and accepted however, there has to be a reasonable amount of privacy that my e-mail offers me. In the current Indian situation, even with lowered pricing, an organization cannot afford to buy individual accounts for its employees. And when they have no option but to “share” an Internet access account, the most voiced complaints one hears are that employees are using
the account to surf the WWW (considered counter-productive by many) and that there is no privacy of messages since all employess have access to the mailbox.

Moreover one has to manually connect and send & download e-mail, a person has to be made responsible for distributing the downloaded e-mail etc. No wonder there is a lcak of privacy!

So how can one take real advantage of the Net? Today? And tomorrow? Here is where people in the “techie” category have an opportunity to do something really worthwhile.

For instance, continuing with the e-mail example, how would you like a piece of software:

• that takes a single Internet account and provides personal, unlimited e-mail ids on top of that
• that automatically uploads and downloads messages at pre-scheduled intervals
• that tracks e-mail usage and maitains statistics on a per person basis
• that has security controls built in
• that does loads of other cute stuff like virtual accounts, auto-responders, multiple POP accounts, etc.
• that uses a non-dedicated machine and a single phone line
• and one that will run on practically an operating system
• that is easy to use

All over a SINGLE Internet account! Sounds too good to be true?
Aim your browsers at http://postmaster.co.in and download a copy of the PostMaster!

The PostMaster clearly illustrates that innovative thinking, understanding of the technology and a solid skill set can (even now) increase manifold the value that an organization can derive from the Internet.

And a solution like this benefits everybody. The ISP is happy because they have more traffic over their network (now that everybody in the organization can have independent e-mail) and at the same time only a single modem-port is being used to serve an entire company. Which immediately benefits their other customers, since they will find it easier to connect to the ISP. MTNL is happy because of similar reasons… and the end users? With a zero-wait time for using e-mail, they would probably be ecstasic!
Long live innovation!

The Internet is here to stay. And there is a storm brewing. And when the dust settles down, there will be only a handful of ISPs (the others having dropped out or bought over) But in any event, the customer will be King.

Here’s wishing you a Happy Networked 1999!

Sharad Popli
sharad@qlcomm.com

Director,
QuantumLink Communications Pvt. Ltd.

(Published in: Economic Times’ ISP-India’99 Special)