Broadband to go free in 2 years ....

NEW DELHI: The government proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL. While consumers would cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it. You have heard of free municipal broadband — many cities in the US have drenched themselves in wireless broadband connectivity which is freely accessible to residents. The idea is to boost economic activity in general.

The government of India plans to achieve free broadband connectivity at a speed of 2 MB per second across the country, with a similar goal. Senior government officials expect to be able to achieve this goal spending only a portion of the corpus of the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF). All telecom operators contribute 5% of their revenues every year to USOF. It is estimated that the unutilised sum from the USOF has touched Rs 9,194.12 crore by March, 2007-end.

The current technological trend is for voice calls also to shift to the internet, using voice over internet protocol (VOIP). The quality of VOIP calls, patchy to start off with, has been improving steadily over the years and by 2009, is likely to be as good as current analogue calls that establish a circuit between the calling and called parties. When that happens, revenue streams from calls would dry up and telecom companies would need to develop value-added applications to make money from the connectivity they provide for free or virtually free. The department of telecom (DoT) will be taking a series of steps to make its plans for free broadband a reality. These include, using the USOF to set an extensive optic cable network across the country, opening up the long-distance sectors to further competition, allowing free and fair access to cable landing stations, permitting the resale of bandwidth, setting up web hosting facilities within the country and asking all internet service providers to connect to the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI). With international bandwidth rates in India being between two-to-five times higher than the global standards, the DoT will also go all out to break the monopoly of existing national and international distance players in a bid to induce cut throat competition in this sector. “India has only a handful of NLD/ILD operators while small countries such as Singapore and Taiwan have over 30 and 60 long distance operators respectively.

With limited players, they control the bandwidth gateways and form a cartel and this ensures that tariffs remain high. The entry of new players such as AT&T, British Telecom amongst others has started creating an impact,” the government source added. Importantly, the ground work for this project is already being laid. This comes as telecom regulator Trai had recently proposed that access to submarine cables be made cost-based and independent companies be given free and fair access to cable landing stations. (Cable landing stations connect submarine telecom cables with data and voice networks in the country.) Additionally, Trai had also recommended that bandwidth resale be permitted in India.

Industry analysts estimate that these two steps by Trai alone will lead to a 30% reduction in bandwidth costs, when implemented. In a related move, the DoT will also issue norms which mandate Indian companies, including state-owned BSNL and MTNL to begin large scale web hosting services. “This is because, most of the internet traffic generated in India is currently routed out of the country and re-routed back, resulting in the increased use of international bandwidth,” the government source said. Additionally, the plan also includes asking all internet service providers to connect their networks to NIXI. This will also ensure that internet traffic, originating and destined for India, is routed within India resulting in optimum domestic bandwidth utilisation. Currently, the very purpose of establishment of NIXI has not been served as only 27 ISPs out of 135 operational ISPs have joined it, the source explained.

Supreme Court sets a price for ragging ..

17 May, 2007 NEW DELHI : -

Ragging could well become a crime of the past. In the strictest measures yet to curb the menace, the Supreme Court on Wednesday warned senior students that if they harass freshers physically or mentally, they would be booked by the police, expelled from college and denied future admissions. Among a slew of directions issued by the court to stamp out ragging, many were aimed at making educational institutions directly responsible for acting against the culprits. These included mandatory registration of FIRs by the institutions whenever a ragging incident comes to light. The punishment "should be exemplary and justifiably harsh to stop recurrence of the ugly incidents", said a Bench comprising Justices Arijit Pasayat and S H Kapadia. More anti-ragging measures would be considered in September, the court said. Its interim directions were based on the recommendations of a committee headed by former CBI director R K Raghavan, who was tasked with finding ways and means to stop ragging in educational institutions. First and foremost, the court took into account the general tendency among institutions to sweep ragging incidents under the carpet in the fear that it would damage its reputation, an act which often emboldens the perpetrators to hunt for fresh prey among freshers. Directing all institutions to set up anti-ragging squads, the Bench said though the victim and his parents were free to approach police to lodge a report against the erring seniors, it was obligatory on the part of the educational institutions to lodge FIRs on ragging incidents without delay. "Failure or delay on the part of the college authorities or management to report the ragging incident to police would make them liable for culpable negligence," the Bench said, indicating that they could also be prosecuted for negligence to bring the guilty to book. Non-reporting of ragging incidents to police could also make an institution liable for reduction in government grants, it said. The court made it clear that the police should make prompt investigations and chargesheet the accused while the courts should fast-track the trial in ragging cases, thus plugging the loophole in the justice delivery system which many exploit to delay trials.

DNA computing

DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA and molecular biology, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies.
This field was initially developed by Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California. In 1994, Adleman demonstrated a proof-of-concept use of DNA as a form of computation which was used to solve the seven-point Hamiltonian path problem. Since the initial Adleman experiments, advances have been made, and various Turing machines have been proven to be constructable.
There are works over one dimensional lengths, bidimensional tiles, and even three dimensional DNA graphs processing.
On April 28, 2004, Ehud Shapiro, Yaakov Benenson, Binyamin Gil, Uri Ben-Dor, and Rivka Adar at the Weizmann Institute announced in the journal Nature that they had constructed a DNA computer. This was coupled with an input and output module and is capable of diagnosing cancerous activity within a cell, and then releasing an anti-cancer drug upon diagnosis.
DNA computing is fundamentally similar to parallel computing in that it takes advantage of the many different molecules of DNA to try many different possibilities at once.
For certain specialized problems, DNA computers are faster and smaller than any other computer built so far. But DNA computing does not provide any new capabilities from the standpoint of computational complexity theory, the study of which computational problems are difficult. For example, problems which grow exponentially with the size of the problem (EXPSPACE problems) on von Neumann machines still grow exponentially with the size of the problem on DNA machines. For very large EXPSPACE problems, the amount of DNA required is too large to be practical. (Quantum computing, on the other hand, does provide some interesting new capabilities).