NETWORK OF THE FUTURE IS HERE...

India is a hotbed for futuristic global technologies. Here are two takes...

Consider these numbers — India is now the world’s leader in consuming data on mobile phones — 1.5 billion GB per month. And we like to watch movies on our handsets — over 60 per cent of all Internet traffic here consists of video... in three years we’ll be consuming some 84 billion video- minutes per month.

Last year we were thrilled if a service provider let us use up 1 GB in a month. Today we demand and get 1 GB/ day. No wonder Indian data networks are grappling with some of the densest traffic in the world. And the hotbed for the world’s top tech companies to launch their futuristic technologies is right here in India.

Just a year after it announced the creation of ‘ Network of the Future’, Cisco a global networking giant, is seeing the widest, fastest adaptation of the new technology in India. It’s called Intent- based networking; that is, the network doesn’t wait to be told what you want it to do. It second guesses and gets on with the job. Like that movie title, it’s all about the Need for Speed.

How does this touch you and me? It enabled HDFC bank to offer the “10 second loan” — make your application on line and the system assesses your need, your payment capacity, credit history and comes to a decision in that many seconds. It enabled the six campuses of NMIMS University to implement mobile phone selfie- based auto attendance for every class, saving a precious 10 per cent of teaching time. It helped India’s biggest logistics player, SafeExpress to shift 80 million packages a day with 99 per cent accuracy and Bengaluru-based Narayana Health to offer remote consultations in thousands of rural locations, country- wide. And an all- data network like Reliance Jio, uses local caches of video content with a Content Delivery Network ( CDN) so that movie clips play without stutter even in a ` 4,000 feature phone.

Indian tech biggies are in the vanguard: Wipro is the first organisation to implement Intent- based networking anywhere in the world and TCS is rolling out its largest implementation. Networks used to be dull bits of hardware, moving data from here to there. But the new intent- savvy network has pushed these wires to ask, not just ‘ where to’, but ‘ why’ and ‘ what’. The carriers have become clever and networking has morphed from so- boring to sexy.