I was once the co-author of an award winning, published paper on 'Convergence Technologies'. The paper, which took one full evening's dedicated cutting and pasting effort from one member of a five member team was published in one of the leading Telecom magazines of the country, and brought laurels to all five authors. I was one of them, and therefore, automatically qualified to be a pioneer in Convergence Technologies.
This was way back in the early two thousands, when bubbles had more to do with software than with soap. Digital was a buzz word and internet was a mantra that would eventually solve world hunger. You would be cool if you used words starting with 'd', 'i', 'e' (ok, guys who use words starting with 'f' have always been 'cool') - dis-intermediation, de-construction, 'e-value chain'...but since I could say 'Convergence' too, I was super cool!!!! Then the bubble burst, and things much worse than soap came on many faces, but I was (ok, with the four other guys) always the convergence stud!
Cut forward six years. I'm now in the US, sleeping in my own apartment on the floor with a pillow to perch my head high up on, and realization dawns on me – I can live without a mattress, but I can't live without a television or telephone! Internet would've been high up on that list of must have's, but a kindly neighbor who never secured his network catered to that basic necessity in life. But phone,I must have my own!
Back to the i-net to research and I get a list of phone companies who service my areas. I spend a late night researching between these, and get a call early next morning (those days, I had a company cell. this was circa pre-no-credit-history-realization) from one of those 'co-pioneers of convergence technologies', who, with me had hitched a free ride to fame!
It's strange how life gives you opportunities to enact your dreams. (Agreed, convergence wasn't a dream, and the only guy in the team who knew anything about just had a baby today, but if I'm considered a convergence-stud, I'm supposed to dream convergence too! )
After a fifteen minute discussion, when we had done a quick roundup of all college day couples and bashed the West for the hunger in Somalia, he asked me about my phone, and told me about this wonderful technology revolutionizing telephony in the US. Sounded sexy, and I decided six years was enough time to let the technologies converge.
Read about it a bit, and it was super-cool! A cable would run into my house and stick it's tongue into my idiot-box. But before that, I'd pull a wire out of its throat into a splitter, and push the other end of it into a modem. The modem would be connected to a router, the router to a phone adapter, the adapter to a phone and the phone would connect me to the world. If all this sounds too linear, the modem had a USB port, the adapter could connect to two phones and the router had four slots and was wireless enabled too (if I didn't secure my network, I'd be a kind neighbor too!) and together, they could mean laptop-works-in-the-loo to the cyber-kids. To me it would mean chaos, but I'd realize that only later!
As I read, I realize that several technologies have converged in a haphazard way, throwing up more options than I cared to count, for me to get my phone working! The best option turned out to be the one explained above, where cable television converged with high speed internet, and telephony was thrown into this concoction.
Mail-in rebates, another concept in the US that made life challenging and worth living, meant I bought the router, modem and adapter at three different shops, from three different vendors, and in the process ended up making $3.33 (well, actually I pay $333.33, but they'll send back a cheque to my grandson, refunding more than that).
I come home, open the boxes to pull out three UFO-ish devices and enough wire to have an electric fence around my house, and connect them all together as instructed. Just as I'm lifting the receiver, I see three diskettes lying, one in each box. I shove them all into my laptop, one after the other, do the installations as instructed, and wow, I'm connected!!!
Everything works fine for a day. Then the laptop sputters and almost stops downloading data. The phone just has a whizz. Cable TV however is crystal clear! Something somewhere wasn't converging, but I wasn't sure what.
I call the cable guy. He threatens to charge $49.99 if it's not his fault. I decide to take the risk. He comes with a briefcase full of flashing meters, plugs them all over my house and tells me the signal is weak. He goes out, and comes back after just the time it'd take an average man to have a fag, and tells me he's boosted the signal, shakes my hand, renews his threat of charging $49.99 the next time I called him, smiles and leaves.
Things are again fine but just for a day. Now I go one level downstream and look at the router with suspicion. Their tech specialist asks me to go to their webpage, upgrade my firmware, press the reset button, utter an incantation thirty times (one way of counting half a minute), reconnect everything, power on all the stuff, and hope my incantation worked. If that didn't, I could hope the new firmware would work. As if I’d understand all he said.
Surprisingly, I did, and more surprisingly, one of those worked, but whichever it was, expired after a day, and the laptop and phone were down again. He asked me if I had any 2.4gHz device in my room. I'd done a course in eM Waves and knew enough to tell him that my pillow couldn't be giving out radiations. He didn’t like the joke and hung up. I tried a trick every Indian kid knows - when something doesn't work, power off and power on. Worked! But again just for a day.
In frustration, I contact the router guys again, and this time, they ask me if I tried the American trick - power off, wait 30 sec, then power on. I try that to realize American tricks are more powerful than Indian tricks. This time it works for 27 hours.
Meanwhile, I lay to rest my convergence dream, also lay to rest my wireless dream (no laptop-in-my-loo) and connect the laptop to my laptop directly.
A day later, something seems to be working. The laptop has been up for 17 hours now and the router guys have admitted the router may be faulty, and are sending a new one.
Pray that the new router will usher the dawn of the Convergence era in my house!!! Long live Convergence. Whatever. Give me a phone connection and an internet connection that's not dependent on my whether my neighbor switches his 2.4gHz gizmo or not!
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