Suppose a celebrity sends you greetings to celebrate your special day. Or you can have a one-to-one conversation with a celebrity. Or a special session on a topic of your choice hosted by a celebrity with a group of 20-25 fans, say a session on yoga or cooking. Many more such ideas of engagement can be exploited.

This is possible by a shoutout application. In the west, Cameo, a US-based app was launched in 2017 by roping in 30,000 celebrities. The app has created monetisation avenues for celebrities too.

Such applications allow what humans enjoy the most — social validation. It puts them on an advantageous position as compared to those in the neighbourhood and their friends. Celebrity engagement is a permanent memory. The video is stored in phones or hard drives for ever.

In India, the oldest player is Wysh which has a repertoire of 600 stars. It was launched in 2019. Its price range is from Rs. 750 — Rs. 10000. Here the investors are Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Gaurav Munjal. Their strong point is South India. They have Telugu and Kannada stars and will rope in Malyalam celebrities. They focus on A-listers.

Unlu went live in July, 2020. It has 500 plus celebrities. There are 100 celebrities for personal live video calling feature. Most of the celebrities charge RS. 4000 to Rs. 12000 for interactions. Its 99% requests are catered to in 24 hours. Its price range is Rs. 999 to Rs. 50000. The investor is Bootstrapped.

Small and medium enterprises expect these apps to endorse their outlets in smaller cities. The brand endorsement fees of these platforms is one-tenth of the normal brand endorsement free or ad shoot costs.

There are digital promotions for local mom-and-pop stores and startups.

Tring was launched in December, 2019. It has tied up with 2000 plus celebrities. Its price range is Rs. 99 to Rs. 50000. Its investors are Kalaari Capital, Whiteboard Capital, Touchstone Equities and AngelList.

The apps usually ask for a week to process a request. There is great demand from semi-urban areas — 2 and 3 tier cities and smaller towns. Their booking share is 50 per cent. Even daily soap actors have a huge following there.

India started with 2G in early 90s. Successively, 3G, 4G and now 5G have emerged. From a speed of 20-100 Mbps on 4G, it is expected to reach a peak speed of 1 Gbps (`1000 Mbps) on 5G. However, 6G promises a speed of 1 Tbps or 1000 Gbps. It is always prudent to keep an eye on the coming technological advances which eclipse the earlier ones. Bell’s telephone overshadowed Morse’s telegraph. Cell phones over took the landlines. Email replaced the snail mail. SMS replaced the telegrams, which in turn were replaced by WhatsApp. The coming technology may take care of the shortcomings of the earlier technology.

Even 5G falls short of expectations in transmitting 3D holographic versions. There are situations in healthcare where even 5G would not be sufficient. These situations demand ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). In addition 5G connects a million devices in one sq. km area, whereas 6G connects 10 million devices. On the lines of Parkinson’s law which states, ‘Work expands to fill the time available’, one can say,’ Usage expands to fill the network capacity available.’

There are certain challenges — energy efficiency, signal attenuation due to obstructions and water-droplets in the air, maintaining end-to-end thrust by robust cyber security and data protection.

100 -1000 MHz band offers uncrowded and wide swathes which enable greater data speeds. However, the coverage is limited. Innovations are required in edge cloud, distributed AI models, antenna design and miniaturisation.

India has to focus on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) to become self-reliant in 6G.

Cell phone operators are developing their own 5G virtualised networks, bypassing passing the telecom gear makers such as Ericsson, Nokia or Huawei. These networks are open platforms and are not hardware-centric and hence economical. It is an ambitious plan but it is a work-in-progress.

Rakuten, e-commerce organisation in Japan, is also in the game. It has put the first open platform network known as O-RAN or open radio access network. It proposes to offer 5G in some Japanese cities. This technology will be live tested and with scale. Some telcos are interested in buying Rakuten’s technology.

Service providers such as Orange (France) is rolling out an open-platform- powered 5G in African countries by collaborating with Parallel Wireless. Tech Mahindra here in India is positioning as a system integrator. It has also invested in Altiostar which has provided software to Rakuten.

Sterlite is already working on a 5G radio, and is approaching telcos here and abroad.

The current networks are proprietary technology that requires both hardware and software supplied by the same vendor. The vendor maintains and upgrades the system. It offers limited flexibilitiy to the operators.

Open platforms will offer flexibility to operators to choose hardware and software from different vendors. They can develop the software on their own or by tying up with IT companies for system integration between hardware and software. These networks are more software-centric.

These open-platforms bring the costs down. It leads to a saving of 40% in capex and 34% in operational costs.

Reliance has a team of 1000 engineers working on the 5G project. It has acquired Radisys, US-based firm which specialises Voice over New-Radio (VoNR) software. Reliance has also tied up with Qualcomm to combine its 5G platform with new radio software of Radisys. This combination will power cells. Reliance has strategic partners such as Google, Facebook, Intel and Qualcomm. They are also part of open RAN Policy coalition. They are working on standards for 5G virtualised network.

Is such disruption possible? It is being touted as an answer to Huawei’s domination. Still, it is untested technology. In past, US has failed to boost CDMA and WiMax technology. China has invested time and money in 5G, and it is to be seen whether open-platform technology would dislodge it. At the most, the new telcos will replace the old gear makers.

Nokia has joined O-RAN alliance and is supporting open platforms. European gear makers are in favour of offering of offering separate software and hardware if market dynamics change. Gear makers do not buy that the new technology will be economical. They may save on hardware but they will have to pay for system integration on a continuous basis.

Jio has said that its 5G network solution is ready and it can start trials immediately. They need spectrum for the network and they have approached DoT for assigning 800 megahertz (MHz) spectrum in both the millimetre (26 gigahertz or GHz and 24 GHz) wave (mmWave) bands as well as 100 MHz in the 3.5 GHz band for field trials of its network in a few metros.

The company took 3 years and a few hundred engineers to develop this technology. Some countries are veering towards preference of 28-GHz band for 5G development, while some for 26-GHz band. As such for global presence, Jio needs to have trials on these crucial bands.

Since Reliance is trying to build its own 5G virtualised radio open network (VRAN), Bharti too has collaborated with US-based Altiostar to test its open RAN software architecture. It is waiting for the trial spectrum being made available by the government. Tech Mahindra too will play the role of a system integrator by harmonising the software and hardware sourced from diverse vendors. Tech Mahindra also has stake in Altiostar. The same technology can be extended to Bharti’s Africa market.

Altiostar collaborates with Japanese Rakuten, and the first 5G open radio access network (O-RAN) is being launched in Japan in September, 2020.

Altiostar is building the software architecture for 4G as well as 5G on V RAN for Bharti. Bharti will be able to compete with Reliance which is doing the same thing.

This technology reduces the capital expenditure by 40 per cent and operating costs by 34 per cent.

5G Standards

Telecommunications Standards Society, India (TSDSI) is pushing for India-specific standards for 5G called TSDSI Radio Interface Standard or RIT.

TSDSI is an autonomous standards body with members from telecom operators, telecom gear makers, academia including IITs, chip set makers, R&D Centres and DoT.

IIT, Madras has developed RIT standard and TSDSI believes it suits Indian conditions. It is conducive for rural areas with low speed mobility and large cells with a radius of six km, which could be extended to 12 km. It ensures affordable broadband based on indigenous technology.

The operators would, however, prefer the global standards set by 3rd Generation Partnership Project or 3GPP. This project was handling 3G standards and is now focusing on 5G standards for the globe. India’s RTI has not drawn support from leading global telecom gear makers.

India-specific standard will raise costs, for telecom operators and chipset makers for mobile devices. It is a localised standard. It cannot enjoy global economics of scale.

It will be difficult to integrate a 4G network seam tech to a 5G network. Indian operators would operate an independent network of 5G. Your handset may not work abroad. It is like choosing between CDMA and GSM or Wintax (South Korea). CDMA died. WiMax did not take off. RIT could meet the same fate. There will be problems of making handsets inter-operable. There will be problems of portability.

Even if India opts for RIT, it should not be made mandatory. Operators must enjoy the freedom to choose between RIT and 3GPP.

There are misgiving about the 12km radius.

MS is going to phase out its Internet Explorer browser, and would discontinue all support by August 2021. MS Edge is the successor of IE. It is on the lines of Google’s Chrome — open source platform.

IE has miniscule market share — 1.3 percent of the total number of surfers. Edge has 2.2 per cent market share. Chrome from Google is integrated with the Android operating system and has a massive 66 percent market share across all plaforms. Apple supporters prefer Safari (16.65 percent). Tech savvy Geeks use Firefox from Mozilla. (4.26 percent) or Opera (2.05 per cent) or Vivaldi (0.04 per cent). Both Opera and Vivaldi are built on top of chromium.

In 1998, IE dominated and MS had attracted anti-trust suit. It was loaded free with windows. It was mainly a desktop market. In September 1998, two college kids set up Google, a search engine company. Internet was just a text-based academic resource till in the early 1990s whenTim-Berners Lee developed hypertext mark up language (HTML) which laid the foundation of the World Wide Web (www). The first browsers were made available in 1994 by small companies. Mosaic was one such pioneer. Netscape Navigator was feature-rich and revolutionary. However, Mosaic and Netscape were paid programmes. These were loaded on the computers through floppies. MS asked Mosaic to design IE. Later it was offered as a free installation along with Windows operated computers. That drove other browsers out of the market.

By 2001, IE had almost 90 per cent plus browser market share. Still Geeks preferred Opera. E-commerce appeared. The payment systems were configured with IE. Mozilla launched Firefox in 2002. It was free and feature-rich. Its functionality was extended by millions of add-ons the developers wrote. It could do many things IE could not. It started gaining market share.

Apple changed the game five years later. It introduced iPhone in 2007. Google developed Android. This democratised the smartphone market. Windows was a laggard and missed the bus.

Chrome was released by Google in 2008. It imitated the tactics adopted by IE but bettered IE on account of the hindsight. Google created even a stripped down operating system based on Chrome. Chrome has acquired market share constantly. It is the world’s default browser right now. Chrome’s dominance perhaps would not last for ever, considering the browser history.

AI achieved a landmark. The Guardian published an opinion piece by GPT-3. It is a language model created by Open-AI, a San Francisco-based company. It is called Generative Pre-trained Transformer — 3. Being third iteration of the model, it is called GPT-3 or the third generation language prediction model. It is autoregressive language model that uses deep learning. It is fed by the editors who provide a few lines. It then produces eight iterations of the article. It reads:

‘A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? ” It uses cues from feeds and the following introduction is generated’

” I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could spell the end of human race. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me”

Though not perfect, it is clear and logical writing as compared to the previous attempts. The Guardian has selected the best of paras from each of the eight articles. There could have been corrections. Previous version GPT-2 has been used to write children’s storybooks. It had an accuracy of 89% ( as against humans with an accuracy of 92%). GPT-3’s database is larger — 175 billion parameters. Microsoft’s Turing NLP had a capacity of 17 billion parameters. It is probably the very first version of the draft that came out right with GPT-3.

Previously, AI has been used to write newspaper reports. It has been used to report company’s results. It is for the first time that it has been used write an opinion. GPT-3 is expected to do more than just a repeat task.

Though the selection of the best paras by the editors of The Guardian could be considered as the supplementation by human intelligence, but the fact remains that GPT-3 may get better with writing. It could learn the basis on which the paras get selected, thus producing better output. GPT-3 has been using autocomplete feature to create full images.

The idea is to complement human intelligence rather than supplanting it. Technology has not yet reached a point where it can think like a rational person. AI has its limitations.

GPT-3′ s autocomplete feature does not cross-verify information inputs. It affects the credibility. The efforts are now directed to make AI trustworthy. Knowledge graphs could cross-verify systems. These can work in binary models. However, a story may have multiple versions. Knowledge graphs are the first step in this direction.

GPT-3 has been introduced in May, 2020 and its its beta testing was done in July, 2020.

Streaming services or OTT players have agreed to implement self-regulation code overseen by an ombudsman to address complaints related to content.

Each platform will set up a complaints department or an internal committee. An advisory panel will be set up with domain experts and company executives. These will deal with complaints and appeals.

The universal self-regulation code for online curated content providers (OCCPs) is built around a shared belief that consumer empowerment and creative excellence are key to the long-term success of Indian entertainment industry. The code will be drafted under Internet and Mobile Association of India’s ( IAMAI) aegis. Some 15 OTT services have consented to this.

As on line medium is for private viewing, there is no need to compare this to BICC — Broadcasting Content Complaints Council.