The Concept of Inconvenience

Yesterday, I had to transport my vehicle from Warangal to Chennai. As the most preferred option for any Indian is Railways, we went to the railway station to book the vehicle. The drama of inconvenience starts from then. I don’t know the case with the rest, but if it is a vehicle, someone should travel in the same train as that of the vehicle. There are, may be, ten trains from Warangal to Chennai but since the vehicle is to be loaded only in three, I can travel only in one of those three trains. Now, if I have a ticket in any of the other trains? Or even worse, I don’t want to travel at all? Well, there is no way to prove I didn’t travel by that train if I have a general ticket and that adds to expense and inconvenience. It simply means, I will have to travel in general bogie even if I have a confirmed seat in a different train or if I am travelling on a different day – no option or select another mode of transport. Whatever the transport is, it is going to take a longer time.

When I came searching for the vehicle, first of all, there will always be a tout – one of the biggest inconveniences in India. This time, the tout who knows only Tamil and me, almost four or five languages excluding Tamil, had a nice exercise walking the full length of the platform trying to find out where the vehicle is and trying to communicate with me in a sane manner. It turned out that it is near the central booking counter and we picked it after an hour of me reaching the station. And all this happened because, instead of loading it into one train, it was loaded into a different one. Or may be, they felt this is a high value item and kept it safely. Or may be, it will get wet in rain. Or a thousand such reasons.

Now comes the next phase of inconvenience – any vehicle in transport will have all petrol drained out. The question is this. Where will I get petrol when I collect my vehicle? As it turned out, there are no petrol bunks within a kilometre of the exit gate of the railway station. Am I supposed to drag the vehicle all along till the petrol bunk? And note, it’s illegal for a person to carry petrol in a bottle – Molotov’s cocktail, may be? This means I can’t go to a petrol bunk to get some fuel and then collect the vehicle. Well, I had another bigger inconvenience because of no accountability as a part of this drama, but there’s no point dealing about as it is not at all related to the discussion.

This is something for the Railway Ministry to introspect –

1.     What is railways doing to increase it’s revenue by end user freight, not business freight? Note that Railways is one of the cheapest mode of transport and people prefer to use that if it is facilitative.

2.     In my case, the tout worked hard and he deserved the money – he walked for almost 3 km with me, got the vehicle delivered and dragged it for 3 km more to the petrol bunk. But, what is railways doing to control the concept of touts? Am I that incompetent to get my things done without a middleman?

Take this specific instance of transporting a vehicle.

3.     Do we really need the customer to travel in the same train? Wouldn’t a representative be sufficient at the other end? Even, what’s the need of an original receipt? A duplicate scanned along with the identity card specified before should be sufficient.

4.     Is there no way Railways can provide the customers fuel, at least sufficient to take them to the nearest petrol bunk, either free or at a charge? Or, can’t it allow one petrol bunk on railway property, at a stone’s throw from the collection point with appropriate directions?

5.     The penalty for being late – if the vehicle is collected after six hours, the penalty will be ten rupees per hour. Are we saying that this number is a deterrent going by the fact that a litre petrol costs 70 rupees and a bus ticket from my house to Chennai Central costs 17 rupees? Either scrap off such fines or give some meaningful numbers. The cost and effort of paperwork in case of penalty is going to be more than the money being collected as in the case of salt tax.

India's Electronic Literacy - Contention Rates

I came across an interesting article today over internet speeds in India. There are two conflicting things which decide the speed which I get - bandwidth decided by the provider and the contention ratio - number of subscribers sharing the bandwidth at the same time. In layman's terms, paraphrasing from the same article from Times of India, Say, 10 customers are sold 2 Mbps connections, which means 20 Mbps should be available. But the company may provide only 5 Mbps for these 10 customers, assuming not all customers will be using their internet connections heavily at the same time. Therefore, the guaranteed internet speed is not 2 Mbps, but just 500 kbps.
5 customers using internet at the same time need 50 Mbps line. But, what is provided is only 5 Mbps which means that the contention ratio is 2.5. The company assumes that no more than 2.5 customers use the line at the same time. This is called contention ratio. But, if all the users are logged in at the same time, we are looking at 500 Kbps as against the promised 2 Mbps. Only thing is, in reality, we are looking at may be 10,000 or 20,000 customers as against the ten used as an example.
On a grander scale, it means that unless the lines are undersubscribed or if it is a very slack period like 2 in the night, it is assured that I will never get the speed which I am promised. If I subscribe to a 10 Mbps line and if I get 2 Mbps, I can survive. But, if I subscribe to a 1 Mbps line and get 250 Kbps(or 64 KBPS), life is going to be a hell. This is a reality which we are forced to face day in and day out and coupled with atrocious signal availability and services, we are staring at an even grimmer picture.
Now, the real questions are these.
1. Who decides the contention ratio for an internet provider?
2. Is there a maximum contention ratio allowed? As a converse, is there a minimum speed an individual should get?
3. Going by the fact that cost of usage of 1 MB of data as a percentage of country's per capita income is highest in India when compared to the top ten economies of the world, what is being done to increase the minimum available speed for a customer?
On a grander scale, though India is fast catching up and this data is slightly old, the below table gives an insight as to what India's position is, vis-a-vis the top ten economies of the world.

Rank	Country/Region	Nominal GDP (100 Billion US$)	Cost of Internet ($ per Mbps)	% Per Capita * 1000
1	United States	174.19	0.86	18.90%
2	China	103.8	4.57	722.62%
3	Japan	46.16	0.02	0.66%
4	Germany	38.6	0.27	6.81%
5	Britain	29.45	0.92	24.18%
6	France	28.47	0.27	7.27%
7	Brazil	23.53	0.55	56.88%
8	Italy	21.48	0.54	18.09%
9	India	20.5	0.97	715.43%
10	Russia	18.57	0.24	22.28%

It is interesting to note that based on what you earn, internet is 1000 times cheaper in Japan or 100 times cheaper in France as compared to India. Though this is offset by the fact that internet penetration in India is only 15% drastically cutting the cost, the issue still remains that internet is filthy costly in India. And arising out of the demand, it is but natural that contention ratios are high/not followed since the rate of increase in availability of spectrum is way less than the number of new electronic literates. 

To address this inconvenience which is going to hit India big time in the next few years, the government should give a set of guidelines as to how are we going to manage the increasing subscriber base. ISPs should also do their homework to make it more viable.

1. What is the expected internet penetration in India after 10 years?

2. What is the spectrum availability at the end of the specified time?

3. Assuming an average internet speed of 5 Mbps, what will be the contention ratio for India as a whole? What should be the maximum permissible deviation from the average? 

4. The dashboard provided to the user should detail the current contention rate vis-a-vis planned contention rate. This single tool will kill the errants.

These numbers should be calculated for India as a whole and for the target clientele - urban, rural, remote and business.

This being said, there should be a roadmap to

1. Increase the spectrum availability by the end of the time

2. Investment in alternate forms of network provision - satellite communication, fibre optics(the work is not completely done), subscription based community hotspots etc

3. Investment in technology and support of entrepreneurship for huge scale up of existing provisions like a single hotspot covering, say, an area of 500 sq km. This will drastically reduce the cost of deployment in remote locations